The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 22

He married in 1924, in Riga, coming from Pskov with a skimpy theatrical company. Was the coupleteer of the show-and when before his act he took off his spectacles to touch up with paint his deadish little face one saw that he had eyes of a smoky blue. His wife was a large, robust woman with short black hair, a glowing complexion, and a fat p.r.i.c.kly nape. Her father sold furniture. Soon after marrying her Graf discovered that she was stupid and coa.r.s.e, that she had bowlegs, and that for every two Russian words she used a dozen German ones. He realized that they must separate, but deferred the decision because of a kind of dreamy compa.s.sion he felt for her and so things dragged until 1926 when she deceived him with the owner of a delicatessen on Lachplesis Street. Graf moved from Riga to Berlin where he was promised a job in a filmmaking firm (which soon folded up). He led an indigent, disorganized, solitary life and spent hours in a cheap pub where he wrote his topical poems. This was the pattern of his life-a life that made little sense-the meager, vapid existence of a third-rate Russian emigre. But as is well known, consciousness is not determined by this or that way of life. In times of comparative ease as well as on such days when one goes hungry and one's clothes begin to rot, Grafitski lived not unhappily-at least before the approach of the fateful year. With perfect good sense he could be called a "busy man," for the subject of his occupation was his own soul-and in such cases, there can be no question of leisure or indeed any necessity for it. We are discussing the air holes of life, a dropped heartbeat, pity, the irruptions of past things-what fragrance is that? What does it remind me of? And why does no one notice that on the dullest street every house is different, and what a profusion there is, on buildings, on furniture, on every object, of seemingly useless ornaments-yes, useless, but full of disinterested, sacrificial enchantment.

Let us speak frankly. There is many a person whose soul has gone to sleep like a leg. Per contra, there exist people endowed with principles, ideals-sick souls gravely affected by problems of faith and morality; they are not artists of sensibility, but the soul is their mine where they dig and drill, working deeper and deeper with the coal-cutting machine of religious conscience and getting giddy from the black dust of sins, small sins, pseudo-sins. Graf did not belong to their group: he lacked any special sins and had no special principles. He busied himself with his individual self, as others study a certain painter, or collect certain mites, or decipher ma.n.u.scripts rich in complex transpositions and insertions, with doodles, like hallucinations, in the margin, and temperamental deletions that burn the bridges between ma.s.ses of imagery-bridges whose restoration is such wonderful fun.

His studies were now interrupted by alien considerations-this was unexpected and dreadfully painful-what should be done about it? After lingering by the window (and doing his best to find some defense against the ridiculous, trivial, but invincible idea that in a few days, on June the nineteenth, he would have attained the age mentioned in his boyhood dream), Graf quietly left his darkening room, in which all objects, buoyed up slightly by the waves of the crepuscule, no longer stood, but floated, like furniture during a great flood. It was still day-and somehow one's heart contracted from the tenderness of early lights. Graf noticed at once that not all was right, that a strange agitation was spreading around: people gathered at the corners of streets, made mysterious angular signals, walked over to the opposite side, and there again pointed at something afar and then stood motionless in eerie att.i.tudes of torpor. In the twilight dimness, nouns were lost, only verbs remained-or at least the archaic forms of a few verbs. This kind of thing might mean a lot: for example, the end of the world. Suddenly with a numbing tingle in every part of his frame, he understood: There, there, across the deep vista between buildings, outlined softly against a clear golden background, under the lower rim of a long ashen cloud, very low, very far, and very slowly, and also ash-colored, also elongated, an airs.h.i.+p was floating by. The exquisite, antique loveliness of its motion, mating with the intolerable beauty of the evening sky, tangerine lights, blue silhouettes of people, caused the contents of Graf's soul to brim over. He saw it as a celestial token, an old-fas.h.i.+oned apparition, reminding him that he was on the point of reaching the established limit of his life; he read in his mind the inexorable obituary: our valuable collaborator ... so early in life ... we who knew him so well ... fresh humor ... fresh grave.... And what was still more inconceivable: all around that obituary, to paraphrase Pushkin again,... indifferent nature would be s.h.i.+ning-the flora of a newspaper, weeds of domestic news, burdocks of editorials.

On a quiet summer night he turned thirty-three. Alone in his room, clad in long underpants, striped like those of a convict, gla.s.sless and blinking, he celebrated his unbidden birthday. He had not invited anybody because he feared such contingencies as a broken pocket mirror or some talk about life's fragility, which the retentive mind of a guest would be sure to promote to the rank of an omen. Stay, stay, moment-thou art not as fair as Goethe's-but nevertheless stay. Here we have an unrepeatable individual in an unrepeatable medium: the storm-felled worn books on the shelves, the little gla.s.s pot of yogurt (said to lengthen life), the tufted brush for cleaning one's pipe, the stout alb.u.m of an ashen tint in which Graf pasted everything, beginning with the clippings of his verse and finis.h.i.+ng with a Russian tram ticket-these are the surroundings of Graf Ytski (a pen name he had thought up on a rainy night while waiting for the next ferry), a b.u.t.terfly-eared, husky little man who sat on the edge of his bed holding the holey violet sock he had just taken off.

Henceforth he began to fear everything-the lift, a draft, builders' scaffolds, the traffic, demonstrators, a truck-mounted platform for the repairing of trolley wires, the colossal dome of the gashouse that might explode right when he pa.s.sed by on his way to the post office, where, furthermore, a bold bandit in a homemade mask might go on a shooting spree. He realized the silliness of his state of mind but was unable to overcome it. In vain did he try to divert his attention, to think of something else: on the footboard at the back of every thought that went speeding by like a sledded carriage stood Smully, the ever-present groom. On the other hand the topical poems with which he continued diligently to supply the papers became more and more playful and artless (since n.o.body should note in them retrospectively the presentiment of nearing death), and those wooden couplets whose rhythm recalled the seesaw of the Russian toy featuring a muzhik and a bear, and in which "shrilly" rhymed with "Dzhugashvili"-those couplets, and not anything else, turned out to be actually the most substantial and fitty piece of his being.

Naturally, faith in the immortality of the soul is not forbidden; but there is one terrible question which n.o.body to my knowledge has set (mused Graf over a mug of beer): may not the soul's pa.s.sage into the hereafter be attended with the possibility of random impediments and vicissitudes similar to the various mishaps surrounding a person's birth in this world? Cannot one help that pa.s.sage to succeed by taking while still alive certain psychological or even physical measures? Which specifically? What must one foresee, what must one stock, what must one avoid? Should one regard religion (argued Graf, dallying in the deserted darkened pub where the chairs were already yawning and being put to bed on the tables)-religion, which covers the walls of life with sacred pictures-as something on the lines of that attempt to create a favorable setting (rather in the same way as, according to certain physicians, the photographs of professional babies, with nice, chubby cheeks, by adorning the bedroom of a pregnant woman act beneficially on the fruit of her womb)? But even if the necessary measures have been taken, even if we do know why Mr. X (who fed on this or that-milk, music-or whatever) safely crossed over into the hereafter, while Mr. Y (whose nourishment was slightly different) got stuck and perished-might there not exist other hazards capable of occurring at the very moment of pa.s.sing over-and somehow getting in one's way, spoiling everything-for, mind you, even animals or plain people creep away when their hour approaches: do not hinder, do not hinder me in my difficult, perilous task, allow me to be delivered peacefully of my immortal soul.

All this depressed Graf, but meaner yet and more terrible was the thought of there not being any "hereafter" at all, that a man's life bursts as irremediably as the bubbles that dance and vanish in a tempestuous tub under the jaws of a rainpipe-Graf watched them from the veranda of the suburban cafe-it was raining hard, autumn had come, four months had elapsed since he had reached the fatidic age, death might hit any minute now-and those trips to the dismal pine barrens near Berlin were extremely risky. If, however, thought Graf, there is no hereafter, then away with it goes everything else that involves the idea of an independent soul, away goes the possibility of omens and presentiments; all right, let us be materialists, and therefore, I, a healthy individual with a healthy heredity shall, probably, live half a century more, and so why yield to neurotic illusions-they are only the result of a certain temporary instability of my social cla.s.s, and the individual is immortal inasmuch as his cla.s.s is immortal-and the great cla.s.s of the bourgeoisie (continued Graf, now thinking aloud with disgusting animation), our great and powerful cla.s.s shall conquer the hydra of the proletariat, for we, too, slave-owners, corn merchants, and their loyal troubadours, must step onto the platform of our cla.s.s (more zip, please), we all, the bourgeois of all countries, the bourgeois of all lands ... and nations, arise, our oil-mad (or gold-mad?) kollektiv, down with plebeian miscreations-and now any verbal adverb ending in 'iv' will do as a rhyme; after that two more strophes and again: up, bourgeois of all lands and nations! long live our sacred kapital! Tra-ta-ta (anything in '-ations'), our bourgeois Internatsional! Is the result witty? Is it amusing?

Winter came. Graf borrowed 50 marks from a neighbor and used the money to eat his fill, since he was not prepared to allow fate the slightest loophole. That odd neighbor, who of his own (his own!) accord had offered financial a.s.sistance, was a newcomer occupying the two best rooms of the fifth floor, called Ivan Ivanovich Engel-a sort of stoutish gentleman with gray locks, resembling the accepted type of a composer or chess maestro, but in point of fact, representing some kind of foreign (very foreign, perhaps, Far Eastern or Celestial) firm. When they happened to meet in the corridor he smiled kindly, shyly, and poor Graf explained this sympathy by a.s.suming his neighbor to be a businessman of no culture, remote from literature and other mountain resorts of the human spirit, and thus instinctively bearing for him, Grafitski the Dreamer, a delicious thrilling esteem. Anyway, Graf had too many troubles to pay much attention to his neighbor, but in a rather absentminded way he kept availing himself of the old gentleman's angelic nature-and on nights of unendurable nicotinelessness, for example, would knock at Mr. Engel's door and obtain a cigar-but did not really grow chummy with him and, indeed, never asked him in (except that time when the desk lamp burned out, and the landlady had chosen that evening for going to the cinema, and the neighbor brought a brand-new bulb and delicately screwed it in).

On Christmas Graf was invited by some literary friends to a yolka (Yule tree) party and through the motley talk told himself with a sinking heart that he saw those colored baubles for the last time. Once, in the middle of a serene February night, he kept looking too long at the firmament and suddenly felt unable to suffer the burden and pressure of human consciousness, that ominous and ludicrous luxury: a detestable spasm made him gasp for breath, and the monstrous star-stained sky swung into motion. Graf curtained the window and, holding one hand to his heart, knocked with the other at Ivan Engel's door. The latter, with a mild smile and a slight German accent, offered him some valerianka. It so happened, by the way, that when Graf entered, he caught Mr. Engel standing in the middle of his bedroom and distilling the calmative into a winegla.s.s-no doubt for his own use: holding the gla.s.s in his right hand and raising high the left one with the dark-amber bottle, he silently moved his lips, counting twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and then very rapidly, as if running on tiptoe, fifteensixteen-seventeen, and again slowly, to twenty. He wore a canary-yellow dressing gown; a pince-nez straddled the tip of his attentive nose.

And after another period of time came spring, and a smell of mastic pervaded the staircase. In the house just across the street somebody died, and for quite a while there was a funereal automobile standing there, of a glossy black, like a grand piano. Graf was tormented by nightmares. He thought he saw tokens in everything, the merest coincidence frightened him. The folly of chance is the logic of fate. How not to believe in fate, in the infallibility of its promptings, in the obstinacy of its purpose, when its black lines persistently show through the handwriting of life?

The more one heeds coincidences the more often they happen. Graf reached a point when having thrown away the newspaper sheet out of which he, an amateur of misprints, had cut out the phrase "after a song and painful illness," he saw a few days later that same sheet with its neat little window in the hands of a marketwoman who was wrapping up a head of cabbage for him; and the same evening, from beyond the remotest roofs a misty and malignant cloud began to swell, engulfing the first stars, and one suddenly felt such a suffocating heaviness as if carrying upstairs on one's back a huge iron-forged trunk-and presently, without warning, the sky lost its balance and the huge chest clattered down the steps. Graf hastened to close and curtain the cas.e.m.e.nt, for as is well known, drafts and electric light attract thunderbolts. A flash shone through the blinds and to determine the distance of the lightning's fall he used the domestic method of counting: the thunderclap came at the count of six which meant six versts. The storm increased. Dry thunderstorms are the worst. The windowpanes shook and rumbled. Graf went to bed, but then imagined so vividly the lightning's striking the roof any moment now, pa.s.sing through all seven floors and transforming him on the way into a convulsively contracted Negro, that he jumped out of bed with a pounding heart (through the blind the cas.e.m.e.nt flashed, the black cross of its sash cast a fleeting shadow upon the wall) and, producing loud clanging sounds in the dark, he removed from the washstand and placed on the floor a heavy faience basin (rigorously wiped) and stood in it, s.h.i.+vering, his bare toes squeaking against the earthenware, virtually all night, until dawn put a stop to the nonsense.

During the May thunderstorm Graf descended to the most humiliating depths of transcendental cowardice. In the morning a break occurred in his mood. He considered the merry bright-blue sky, the arborescent designs of dark humidity crossing the drying asphalt, and realized that only one more month remained till the nineteenth of June. On that day he would be thirty-four. Land! But would he be able to swim that distance? Could he hold out?

He hoped he could. Zestfully, he decided to take extraordinary measures to protect his life from the claims of fate. He stopped going out. He did not shave. He pretended to be ill; his landlady took care of his meals, and through her Mr. Engel would transmit to him an orange, a magazine, or laxative powder in a dainty little envelope. He smoked less and slept more. He worked out the crosswords in the emigre papers, breathed through his nose, and before going to bed was careful to spread a wet towel over his bedside rug in order to be at once awakened by its chill, if his body tried, in a somnambulistic trance, to sneak past the surveillance of thought.

Would he make it? June the first. June the second. June the third. On the tenth the neighbor inquired through the door if he was all right. The eleventh. The twelfth. The thirteenth. Like that world-famous Finnish runner who throws away, before the last lap, his nickel-plated watch which has helped him to compute his strong smooth course, so Graf, on seeing the end of the track, abruptly changed his mode of action. He shaved off his straw-colored beard, took a bath, and invited guests for the nineteenth.

He did not give in to the temptation of celebrating his birthday one day earlier, as slyly advised by the imps of the calendar (he was born in the previous century when there were twelve, not thirteen, days between the Old Style and the New, by which he lived now); but he did write to his mother in Pskov asking her to apprise him of the exact hour of his birth. Her reply, however, was rather evasive: "It happened at night. I remember being in great pain."

The nineteenth dawned. All morning, his neighbor could be heard walking up and down in his room, displaying unusual agitation, and even running out into the corridor whenever the front-door bell rang, as if he awaited some message. Graf did not invite him to the evening party-they hardly knew each other after all-but he did ask the landlady, for Graf's nature oddly united absentmindedness and calculation. In the late afternoon he went out, bought vodka, meat patties, smoked herring, black bread.... On his way home, as he was crossing the street, with the unruly provisions in his unsteady embrace, he noticed Mr. Engel illumined by the yellow sun, watching him from the balcony.

Around eight o'clock, at the very moment that Graf, after nicely laying the table, leaned out of the window, the following happened: at the corner of the street, where a small group of men had collected in front of the pub, loud angry cries rang out followed suddenly by the cracking of pistol shots. Graf had the impression that a stray bullet whistled past his face, almost smas.h.i.+ng his gla.s.ses, and with an "akh" of terror, he drew back. From the hallway came the sound of the frontdoor bell. Trembling, Graf peeped out of his room, and simultaneously, Ivan Ivanovich Engel, in his canary-yellow dressing gown, swept into the hallway. It was a messenger with the telegram he had been awaiting all day. Engel opened it eagerly-and beamed with joy.

"Was dort fur Skandale?" asked Graf, addressing the messenger, but the latter-baffled, no doubt, by his questioner's bad German-did not understand, and when Graf, very cautiously, looked out of the window again, the sidewalk in front of the pub was empty, the janitors sat on chairs near their porches, and a bare-calved housemaid was walking a pinkish toy poodle.

At about nine all the guests were there-three Russians and the German landlady. She brought five liqueur gla.s.ses and a cake of her own making. She was an ill-formed woman in a rustling violet dress, with prominent cheekbones, a freckled neck, and the wig of a comedy mother-in-law. Graf's gloomy friends, emigre men of letters, all of them elderly, ponderous people, with various ailments (the tale of which always comforted Graf), immediately got the landlady drunk, and got tight themselves without growing merrier. The conversation was, of course, conducted in Russian; the landlady did not understand a word of it, yet giggled, rolled in futile coquetry her poorly penciled eyes, and kept up a private soliloquy, but n.o.body listened to her. Graf every now and then consulted his wrist.w.a.tch under the table, yearned for the nearest churchtower to strike midnight, drank orange juice, and took his pulse. By midnight the vodka gave out and the landlady, staggering and laughing her head off, fetched a bottle of cognac. "Well, your health, staraya Morda" (old fright), one of the guests coldly addressed her, and she naively, trustfully, clinked gla.s.ses with him, and then stretched toward another drinker, but he brushed her away.

At sunrise Grafitski said good-bye to his guests. On the little table in the hallway there lay, he noticed, now torn open and discarded, the telegram that had so delighted his neighbor. Graf abstractly read it: "SOGLASEN PRODLENIE" ("EXTENSION AGREED"), then he returned to his room, introduced some order, and, yawning, replete with a strange sense of boredom (as if he had planned the length of his life according to the prediction, and now had to start its construction all over again), sat down in an armchair and flipped through a dilapidated book (somebody's birthday present)-a Russian anthology of good stories and puns, published in the Far East: "How's your son, the poet?"-"He's a s.a.d.i.s.t now."-"Meaning?"-"He writes only sad distichs." Gradually Graf dozed off in his chair and in his dream he saw Ivan Ivanovich Engel singing couplets in a garden of sorts and fanning his bright-yellow, curly-feathered wings, and when Graf woke up the lovely June sun was lighting little rainbows in the landlady's liqueur gla.s.ses, and everything was somehow soft and luminous and enigmatic-as if there was something he had not understood, not thought through to the end, and now it was already too late, another life had begun, the past had withered away, and death had quite, quite removed the meaningless memory, summoned by chance from the distant and humble home where it had been living out its obscure existence.

TERRA INCOGNITA.

THE sound of the waterfall grew more and more m.u.f.fled, until it finally dissolved altogether, and we moved on through the wildwood of a hitherto unexplored region. We walked, and had been walking, for a long time already-in front, Gregson and I; our eight native porters behind, one after the other; last of all, whining and protesting at every step, came Cook. I knew that Gregson had recruited him on the advice of a local hunter. Cook had insisted that he was ready to do anything to get out of Zonraki, where they pa.s.s half the year brewing their von-gho and the other half drinking it. It remained unclear, however-or else I was already beginning to forget many things, as we walked on and on-exactly who this Cook was (a runaway sailor, perhaps?).

Gregson strode on beside me, sinewy, lanky, with bare, bony knees. He held a long-handled green b.u.t.terfly net like a banner. The porters, big, glossy-brown Badonians with thick manes of hair and cobalt arabesques between their eyes, whom we had also engaged in Zonraki, walked with a strong, even step. Behind them straggled Cook, bloated, red-haired, with a drooping underlip, hands in pockets and carrying nothing. I recalled vaguely that at the outset of the expedition he had chattered a lot and made obscure jokes, in a manner he had, a mixture of insolence and servility, reminiscent of a Shakespearean clown; but soon his spirits fell and he grew glum and began to neglect his duties, which included interpreting, since Gregson's understanding of the Badonian dialect was still poor.

There was something languorous and velvety about the heat. A stifling fragrance came from the inflorescences of Vallieria mirifica, mother-of-pearl in color and resembling cl.u.s.ters of soap bubbles, that arched across the narrow, dry streambed along which we proceeded. The branches of porphyroferous trees intertwined with those of the black-leafed limia to form a tunnel, penetrated here and there by a ray of hazy light. Above, in the thick ma.s.s of vegetation, among brilliant pendulous racemes and strange dark tangles of some kind, h.o.a.ry monkeys snapped and chattered, while a cometlike bird flashed like Bengal light, crying out in its small, shrill voice. I kept telling myself that my head was heavy from the long march, the heat, the medley of colors, and the forest din, but secretly I knew that I was ill. I surmised it to be the local fever. I had resolved, however, to conceal my condition from Gregson, and had a.s.sumed a cheerful, even merry air, when disaster struck.

"It's my fault," said Gregson. "I should never have got involved with him."

We were now alone. Cook and all eight of the natives, with tent, folding boat, supplies, and collections, had deserted us and vanished noiselessly while we busied ourselves in the thick bush, chasing fascinating insects. I think we tried to catch up with the fugitives-I do not recall clearly, but, in any case, we failed. We had to decide whether to return to Zonraki or continue our projected itinerary, across as yet unknown country, toward the Gurano Hills. The unknown won out. We moved on. I was already s.h.i.+vering all over and deafened by quinine, but still went on collecting nameless plants, while Gregson, though fully realizing the danger of our situation, continued catching b.u.t.terflies and diptera as avidly as ever.

We had scarcely walked half a mile when suddenly Cook overtook us. His s.h.i.+rt was torn-apparently by himself, deliberately-and he was panting and gasping. Without a word Gregson drew his revolver and prepared to shoot the scoundrel, but he threw himself at Gregson's feet and, s.h.i.+elding his head with both arms, began to swear that the natives had led him away by force and had wanted to eat him (which was a lie, for the Badonians are not cannibals). I suspect that he had easily incited them, stupid and timorous as they were, to abandon the dubious journey, but had not taken into account that he could not keep up with their powerful stride and, having fallen hopelessly behind, had returned to us. Because of him invaluable collections were lost. He had to die. But Gregson put away the revolver and we moved on, with Cook wheezing and stumbling behind.

The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations. I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-colored snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe with dim reflections, but then I took hold of myself, looked more carefully, and found that it was only the deceptive glimmer of an acreana bush (a curly plant with large berries resembling plump prunes). After a while the trees parted altogether and the sky rose before us like a solid wall of blue. We were at the top of a steep incline. Below s.h.i.+mmered and steamed an enormous marsh, and, far beyond, one distinguished the tremulous silhouette of a mauve-colored range of hills.

"I swear to G.o.d we must turn back," said Cook in a sobbing voice. "I swear to G.o.d we'll perish in these swamps-I've got seven daughters and a dog at home. Let's turn back-we know the way...."

He wrung his hands, and the sweat rolled from his fat, red-browed face. "Home, home," he kept repeating. "You've caught enough bugs. Let's go home!"

Gregson and I began to descend the stony slope. At first Cook remained standing above, a small white figure against the monstrously green background of forest; but suddenly he threw up his hands, uttered a cry, and started to slither down after us.

The slope narrowed, forming a rocky crest that reached out like a long promontory into the marshes; they sparkled through the steamy haze. The noonday sky, now freed of its leafy veils, hung oppressively over us with its blinding darkness-yes, its blinding darkness, for there is no other way to describe it. I tried not to look up; but in this sky, at the very verge of my field of vision, there floated, always keeping up with me, whitish phantoms of plaster, stucco curlicues and rosettes, like those used to adorn European ceilings; however, I had only to look directly at them and they would vanish, and again the tropical sky would boom, as it were, with even, dense blueness. We were still walking along the rocky promontory, but it kept tapering and betraying us. Around it grew golden marsh reeds, like a million bared swords gleaming in the sun. Here and there flashed elongated pools, and over them hung dark swarms of midges. A large swamp flower, presumably an orchid, stretched toward me its drooping, downy lip, which seemed smeared with egg yolk. Gregson swung his net-and sank to his hips in the brocaded ooze as a gigantic swallowtail, with a flap of its satin wing, sailed away from him over the reeds, toward the s.h.i.+mmer of pale emanations where the indistinct folds of a window curtain seemed to hang. I must not, I said to myself, I must not.... I s.h.i.+fted my gaze and walked on beside Gregson, now over rock, now across hissing and lip-smacking soil. I felt chills, in spite of the greenhouse heat. I foresaw that in a moment I would collapse altogether, that the contours and convexities of delirium, showing through the sky and through the golden reeds, would gain complete control of my consciousness. At times Gregson and Cook seemed to grow transparent, and I thought I saw, through them, wallpaper with an endlessly repeated design of reeds. I took hold of myself, strained to keep my eyes open, and moved on. Cook by now was crawling on all fours, yelling, and s.n.a.t.c.hing at Gregson's legs, but the latter would shake him off and keep walking. I looked at Gregson, at his stubborn profile, and felt, to my horror, that I was forgetting who Gregson was, and why I was with him.

Meanwhile we kept sinking into the ooze more and more frequently, deeper and deeper; the insatiable mire would suck at us; and, wriggling, we would slip free. Cook kept falling down and crawling, covered with insect bites, all swollen and soaked, and, dear G.o.d, how he would squeal when disgusting bevies of minute, bright-green hydrotic snakes, attracted by our sweat, would take off in pursuit of us, tensing and uncoiling to sail two yards and then another two. I, however, was much more frightened by something else: now and then, on my left (always, for some reason, on my left), listing among the repet.i.tious reeds, what seemed a large armchair but was actually a strange, c.u.mbersome gray amphibian, whose name Gregson refused to tell me, would rise out of the swamp.

"A break," said Gregson abruptly, "let's take a break."

By a stroke of luck we managed to scramble onto an islet of rock, surrounded by the swamp vegetation. Gregson took off his knapsack and issued us some native patties, smelling of ipecacuanha, and a dozen acreana fruit. How thirsty I was, and how little help was the scanty, astringent juice of the acreana....

"Look, how odd," Gregson said to me, not in English, but in some other language, so that Cook would not understand. "We must get through to the hills, but look, how odd-could the hills have been a mirage?-they are no longer visible."

I raised myself up from my pillow and leaned my elbow on the resilient surface of the rock.... Yes, it was true that the hills were no longer visible; there was only the quivering vapor hanging over the marsh. Once again everything around me a.s.sumed an ambiguous transparency. I leaned back and said softly to Gregson, "You probably can't see, but something keeps trying to come through."

"What are you talking about?" asked Gregson.

I realized that what I was saying was nonsense and stopped. My head was spinning and there was a humming in my ears; Gregson, down on one knee, rummaged through his knapsack, but found no medicine there, and my supply was exhausted. Cook sat in silence, morosely picking at a rock. Through a rent in his s.h.i.+rtsleeve there showed a strange tattoo on his arm: a crystal tumbler with a teaspoon, very well executed.

"Valliere is sick-haven't you got some tablets?" Gregson said to him. I did not hear the exact words, but I could guess the general sense of their talk, which would grow absurd and somehow spherical when I tried to listen more closely.

Cook turned slowly and the gla.s.sy tattoo slid off his skin to one side, remaining suspended in midair; then it floated off, floated off, and I pursued it with my frightened gaze, but, as I turned away, it lost itself in the vapor of the swamp, with a last faint gleam.

"Serves you right," muttered Cook. "It's just too bad. The same will happen to you and me. Just too bad...."

In the course of the last few minutes-that is, ever since we had stopped to rest on the rocky islet-he seemed to have grown larger, had swelled, and there was now something mocking and dangerous about him. Gregson took off his sun helmet and, pulling out a dirty handkerchief, wiped his forehead, which was orange over the brows, and white above that. Then he put on his helmet again, leaned over to me, and said, "Pull yourself together, please" (or words to that effect). "We shall try to move on. The vapor is hiding the hills, but they are there. I am certain we have covered about half the swamp." (This is all very approximate.) "Murderer," said Cook under his breath. The tattoo was now again on his forearm; not the entire gla.s.s, though, but one side of it-there was not quite enough room for the remainder, which quivered in s.p.a.ce, casting reflections. "Murderer," Cook repeated with satisfaction, raising his inflamed eyes. "I told you we would get stuck here. Black dogs eat too much carrion. Mi, re, fa, sol."

"He's a clown," I softly informed Gregson, "a Shakespearean clown."

"Clow, clow, clow," Gregson answered, "clow, clow-clo, clo, clo.... Do you hear," he went on, shouting in my ear. "You must get up. We have to move on."

The rock was as white and as soft as a bed. I raised myself a little, but promptly fell back on the pillow.

"We shall have to carry him," said Gregson's faraway voice. "Give me a hand."

"Fiddlesticks," replied Cook (or so it sounded to me). "I suggest we enjoy some fresh meat before he dries up. Fa, sol, mi, re."

"He's sick, he's sick too," I cried to Gregson. "You're here with two lunatics. Go ahead alone. You'll make it.... Go."

"Fat chance we'll let him go," said Cook.

Meanwhile delirious visions, taking advantage of the general confusion, were quietly and firmly finding their places. The lines of a dim ceiling stretched and crossed in the sky. A large armchair rose, as if supported from below, out of the swamp. Glossy birds flew through the haze of the marsh and, as they settled, one turned into the wooden k.n.o.b of a bedpost, another into a decanter. Gathering all my willpower, I focused my gaze and drove off this dangerous trash. Above the reeds flew real birds with long flame-colored tails. The air buzzed with insects. Gregson was waving away a varicolored fly, and at the same time trying to determine its species. Finally he could contain himself no longer and caught it in his net. His motions underwent curious changes, as if someone kept reshuffling them. I saw him in different poses simultaneously; he was divesting himself of himself, as if he were made of many gla.s.s Gregsons whose outlines did not coincide. Then he condensed again, and stood up firmly. He was shaking Cook by the shoulder.

"You are going to help me carry him," Gregson was saying distinctly. "If you were not a traitor, we would not be in this mess."

Cook remained silent, but slowly flushed purple.

"See here, Cook, you'll regret this," said Gregson. "I'm telling you for the last time-"

At this point occurred what had been ripening for a long time. Cook drove his head like a bull into Gregson's stomach. They both fell; Gregson had time to get his revolver out, but Cook managed to knock it out of his hand. Then they clutched each other and started rolling in their embrace, panting deafeningly. I looked at them, helpless. Cook's broad back would grow tense and the vertebrae would show through his s.h.i.+rt; but suddenly, instead of his back, a leg, also his, would appear, covered with coppery hairs, and with a blue vein running up the skin, and Gregson was rolling on top of him. Gregson's helmet flew off and wobbled away, like half of an enormous cardboard egg. From somewhere in the labyrinth of their bodies Cook's fingers wriggled out, clenching a rusty but sharp knife; the knife entered Gregson's back as if it were clay, but Gregson only gave a grunt, and they both rolled over several times; when I next saw my friend's back the handle and top half of the blade protruded, while his hands had locked around Cook's thick neck, which crunched as he squeezed, and Cook's legs were twitching. They made one last full revolution, and now only a quarter of the blade was visible-no, a fifth-no, now not even that much showed: it had entered completely. Gregson grew still after having piled on top of Cook, who had also become motionless.

I watched, and it seemed to me (fogged as my senses were by fever) that this was all a harmless game, that in a moment they would get up and, when they had caught their breath, would peacefully carry me off across the swamp toward the cool blue hills, to some shady place with babbling water. But suddenly, at this last stage of my mortal illness-for I knew that in a few minutes I would die-in these final minutes everything grew completely lucid: I realized that all that was taking place around me was not the trick of an inflamed imagination, not the veil of delirium, through which unwelcome glimpses of my supposedly real existence in a distant European city (the wallpaper, the armchair, the gla.s.s of lemonade) were trying to show. I realized that the obtrusive room was fict.i.tious, since everything beyond death is, at best, fict.i.tious: an imitation of life hastily knocked together, the furnished rooms of nonexistence. I realized that reality was here, here beneath that wonderful, frightening tropical sky, among those gleaming swordlike reeds, in that vapor hanging over them, and in the thick-lipped flowers clinging to the flat islet, where, beside me, lay two clinched corpses. And, having realized this, I found within me the strength to crawl over to them and pull the knife from the back of Gregson, my leader, my dear friend. He was dead, quite dead, and all the little bottles in his pockets were broken and crushed. Cook, too, was dead, and his ink-black tongue protruded from his mouth. I pried open Gregson's fingers and turned his body over. His lips were half-open and b.l.o.o.d.y; his face, which already seemed hardened, appeared badly shaven; the bluish whites of his eyes showed between the lids. For the last time I saw all this distinctly, consciously, with the seal of authenticity on everything-their skinned knees, the bright flies circling over them, the females of those flies already seeking a spot for oviposition. Fumbling with my enfeebled hands, I took a thick notebook out of my s.h.i.+rt pocket, but here I was overcome by weakness; I sat down and my head drooped. And yet I conquered this impatient fog of death and looked around. Blue air, heat, solitude.... And how sorry I felt for Gregson, who would never return home-I even remembered his wife and the old cook, and his parrots, and many other things. Then I thought about our discoveries, our precious finds, the rare, still undescribed plants and animals that now would never be named by us. I was alone. Hazier flashed the reeds, dimmer flamed the sky. My eyes followed an exquisite beetle that was crawling across a stone, but I had no strength left to catch it. Everything around me was fading, leaving bare the scenery of death-a few pieces of realistic furniture and four walls. My last motion was to open the book, which was damp with my sweat, for I absolutely had to make a note of something; but, alas, it slipped out of my hand. I groped all along the blanket, but it was no longer there.

THE REUNION.

LEV had a brother, Serafim, who was older and fatter than he, although it was entirely possible that during the past nine years-no, wait ... G.o.d, it was ten, more than ten-he had got thinner, who knows. In a few minutes we shall find out. Lev had left Russia and Serafim had remained, a matter of pure chance in both cases. In fact, you might say that it was Lev who had been leftish, while Serafim, a recent graduate of the Polytechnic Inst.i.tute, thought of nothing but his chosen field and was wary of political air currents.... How strange, how very strange that in a few minutes he would come in. Was an embrace called for? So many years ... A "spets," a specialist. Ah, those words with the chewed-off endings, like discarded fishheads ... "spets"...

There had been a phone call that morning, and an unfamiliar female voice had announced in German that he had arrived, and would like to drop in that evening, as he was leaving again the following day. This had come as a surprise, even though Lev already knew that his brother was in Berlin. Lev had a friend who had a friend, who in turn knew a man who worked at the USSR Trade Mission. Serafim had come on an a.s.signment to arrange a purchase of something or other. Was he a Party member? More than ten years ...

All those years they had been out of touch. Serafim knew absolutely nothing about his brother, and Lev knew next to nothing about Serafim. A couple of times Lev caught a glimpse of Serafim's name through the smokescreen grayness of the Soviet papers that he glanced through at the library. "And inasmuch as the fundamental prerequisite of industrialization," spouted Serafim, "is the consolidation of socialist elements in our economic system generally, radical progress in the village emerges as one of the particularly essential and immediate current tasks."

Lev, who had finished his studies with an excusable delay at the University of Prague (his thesis was about Slavophile influences in Russian literature), was now seeking his fortune in Berlin, without ever really being able to decide where that fortune lay: in dealing in various knickknacks, as Leshcheyev advised, or in a printer's job, as Fuchs suggested. Leshcheyev and Fuchs and their wives, by the way, were supposed to come over that evening (it was Russian Christmas). Lev had spent his last bit of cash on a secondhand Christmas tree, fifteen inches tall; a few crimson candles; a pound of zwieback; and half a pound of candy. His guests had promised to take care of the vodka and the wine. However, as soon as he received the conspiratorial, incredible message that his brother wanted to see him, Lev promptly called off the party. The Leshcheyevs were out, and he left word with the maid that something unexpected had come up. Of course, a face-to-face talk with his brother in stark privacy would already be sheer torture, but it would be even worse if ... "This is my brother, he's here from Russia." "Pleased to meet you. Well, are they about ready to croak?" "Whom exactly are you referring to? I don't understand." Leshcheyev was particularly impa.s.sioned and intolerant.... No, the Christmas party had to be called off.

Now, at about eight in the evening, Lev was pacing his shabby but clean little room, b.u.mping now against the table, now against the white headboard of the lean bed-a needy but neat little man, in a black suit worn s.h.i.+ny and a turndown collar that was too large for him. His face was beardless, snub-nosed, and not very distinguished, with smallish, slightly mad eyes. He wore spats to hide the holes in his socks. He had recently been separated from his wife, who had quite unexpectedly betrayed him, and with whom! A vulgarian, a nonent.i.ty.... Now he put away her portrait; otherwise he would have to answer his brother's questions ("Who's that?" "My ex-wife." "What do you mean, ex?"). He removed the Christmas tree too, setting it, with his landlady's permission, out on her balcony-otherwise, who knows, his brother might start making fun of emigre sentimentality. Why had he bought it in the first place? Tradition. Guests, candlelight. Turn off the lamp-let the little tree glow alone. Mirrorlike glints in Mrs. Leshcheyev's pretty eyes.

What would he talk about to his brother? Should he tell him, casually and lightheartedly, about his adventures in the south of Russia at the time of the civil war? Should he jokingly complain about his present (unbearable, stifling) poverty? Or pretend to be a broadminded man who was above emigre resentment, and understood ... understood what? That Serafim could have preferred to my poverty, my purity, an active collaboration ... and with whom, with whom! Or should he, instead, attack him, shame him, argue with him, even be acidly witty? "Grammatically, Leningrad can only mean the town of Nellie."

He pictured Serafim, his meaty, sloping shoulders, his huge rubbers, the puddles in the garden in front of their dacha, the death of their parents, the beginning of the Revolution.... They had never been particularly close-even when they were at school, each had his own friends, and their teachers were different.... In the summer of his seventeenth year Serafim had a rather unsavory affair with a lady from a neighboring dacha, a lawyer's wife. The lawyer's hysterical screams, the flying fists, the disarray of the not so young lady, with the catlike face, running down the garden avenue and, somewhere in the background, the disgraceful noise of shattering gla.s.s. One day, while swimming in a river, Serafim had nearly drowned.... These were Lev's more colorful recollections of his brother, and G.o.d knows they didn't amount to much. You often feel that you remember someone vividly and in detail, then you check the matter and it all turns out to be so inane, so meager, so shallow-a deceptive facade, a bogus enterprise on the part of your memory. Nevertheless, Serafim was still his brother. He ate a lot. He was orderly. What else? One evening, at the tea table ...

The clock struck eight. Lev cast a nervous glance out the window. It was drizzling, and the streetlamps swam in the mist. The white remains of wet snow showed on the sidewalk. Warmed-over Christmas. Pale paper ribbons, left over from the German New Year, hung from a balcony across the street, quivering limply in the dark. The sudden peal of the front-door bell hit Lev like a flash of electricity somewhere in the region of his solar plexus.

He was even bigger and fatter than before. He pretended to be terribly out of breath. He took Lev's hand. Both of them were silent, with identical grins on their faces. A Russian wadded coat, with a small astrakhan collar that fastened with a hook; a gray hat that had been bought abroad.

"Over here," said Lev. "Take it off. Come, I'll put it here. Did you find the house right away?"

"Took the subway," said Serafim, panting. "Well, well. So that's how it is...."

With an exaggerated sigh of relief he sat down in an armchair.

"There'll be some tea ready in a minute," Lev said in a bustling tone as he fussed with a spirit lamp on the sink.

"Foul weather," said Serafim, rubbing his palms together. Actually it was rather warm out.

The alcohol went into a copper sphere; when you turned a thumbscrew it oozed into a black groove. You had to release a tiny amount, turn the screw shut, and light a match. A soft, yellowish flame would appear, floating in the groove, then gradually die, whereupon you opened the valve again, and, with a loud report (under the iron base where a tall tin teapot bearing a large birthmark on its flank stood with the air of a victim) a very different, livid flame like a serrated blue crown burst into life. How and why all this happened Lev did not know, nor did the matter interest him. He blindly followed the landlady's instructions. At first Serafim watched the fuss with the spirit lamp over his shoulder, to the extent allowed by his corpulence; then he got up and came closer, and they talked for a while about the apparatus, Serafim explaining its operation and turning the thumbscrew gently back and forth.

"Well, how's life?" he asked, sinking once again into the tight armchair.

"Well-you can see for yourself," replied Lev. "Tea will be ready in a minute. If you're hungry I have some sausage."

Serafim declined, blew his nose thoroughly, and started discussing Berlin.

"They've outdone America," he said. "Just look at the traffic. The city has changed enormously. I was here, you know, in 'twenty-four."

"I was living in Prague at the time," said Lev.

"I see," said Serafim.

Silence. They both watched the teapot, as if they expected some miracle from it.

"It's going to boil soon," said Lev. "Have some of these caramels in the meantime."

Serafim did and his left cheek started working. Lev still could not bring himself to sit down: sitting meant getting set for a chat; he preferred to stand or keep loitering between bed and table, table and sink. Several fir needles lay scattered about the colorless carpet. Suddenly the faint hissing ceased.

"Prussak kaput," said Serafim.

"We'll fix that," Lev began in haste, "just one second."

But there was no alcohol left in the bottle. "Stupid situation.... You know, I'll go get some from the landlady."

He went out into the corridor and headed for her quarters.- Idiotic. He knocked on the door. No answer. Not an ounce of attention, a pound of contempt. Why did it come to mind, that schoolboy tag (uttered when ignoring a tease)? He knocked again. Everything was dark. She was out. He found his way to the kitchen. The kitchen had been providently locked.

Lev stood for a while in the corridor, thinking not so much about the alcohol as about what a relief it was to be alone for a minute and what agony it would be to return to that tense room where a stranger was securely ensconced. What might one discuss with him? That article on Faraday in an old issue of Die Natur? No, that wouldn't do. When he returned Serafim was standing by the bookshelf, examining the tattered, miserable-looking volumes.

"Stupid situation," said Lev. "It's really frustrating. Forgive me, for heaven's sake. Maybe ..."

(Maybe the water was just about to boil? No. Barely tepid.) "Nonsense. To be frank, I'm not a great lover of tea. You read a lot, don't you?"

(Should he go downstairs to the pub and get some beer? Not enough money and no credit there. d.a.m.n it, he'd blown it all on the candy and the tree.) "Yes, I do read," he said aloud. "What a shame, what a d.a.m.n shame. If only the landlady ..."

"Forget it," said Serafim, "we'll do without. So that's how it is. Yes. And how are things in general? How's your health? Feeling all right? One's health is the main thing. As for me, I don't do much reading," he went on, looking askance at the bookshelf. "Never have enough time. On the train the other day I happened to pick up-"

The phone rang in the corridor.

"Excuse me," said Lev. "Help yourself. Here's the zwieback, and the caramels. I'll be right back." He hurried out.