Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (42 page)

And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.

A special danger area in Pnin’s case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as “The rest is silence,” “Never more,” “weekend,” “
Who’s Who,
” and a few ordinary words and phrases like “cat,” “street,” “fountain pen,” “gangster,” “the Charleston,” and “marginal utility,” he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1945, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like “wishful thinking” and “okey-dokey.” By 1946, he was able to interrupt his narrations with the phrase “To make a long story short.” By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle quite a number of elegant clichés, but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite all his efforts, and in 1953 his English was still full of flaws. That autumn, he supplemented the usual courses of his academic year by delivering a weekly lecture in a so-called symposium (“Wingless Europe: A Survey of Contemporary Continental Culture”) directed by Dr. Hagen. All our friend’s lectures, including sundry ones he gave out of town, were edited by one of the younger members of the German Department. The procedure was somewhat complicated. Professor Pnin laboriously translated his own Russian verbal flow, teeming with idiomatic proverbs, into patchy English. This was revised by young Miller. Then Dr. Hagen’s secretary, a Miss Eisenlohr, typed it out. Then Pnin deleted the passages he could not understand. Then he read it to his weekly audience. He was utterly helpless without the prepared text, nor could he use the ancient system of dissimulating his infirmity by moving his eyes up and down—snapping up an eyeful of words, reeling them off to his audience, and drawing out the end of one sentence while diving for the next. Pnin’s worried eye would be bound to lose its bearings. Therefore he read his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.

THE conductor, a gray-headed, fatherly person with steel spectacles placed rather low on his simple, functional nose and a bit of soiled adhesive tape on his thumb, had now only three coaches to deal with before reaching the last one, where Pnin rode.

Pnin in the meantime had yielded to the satisfaction of a special Pninian craving. He was in a Pninian quandary. Among other articles indispensable for a Pninian overnight stay in a strange town, such as shoe trees, apples, and dictionaries, his Gladstone bag contained a relatively new black suit he planned to wear that night for the lecture (“Are the Russian People Communist?”) before the Cremona ladies. It also contained next Monday’s symposium lecture (“Don Quixote and Faust”), which he intended to study the next day, on his way back to Waindell, and a paper by a graduate student, Betty Bliss (“Dostoevski and Gestalt Psychology”), that he had to read for Dr. Hagen. The quandary was as follows: If he kept the Cremona manuscript—a sheaf of typewriter-size pages, carefully folded down the center so as to fit into a pocket of his coat—on his person, in the security of his body warmth, the chances were, theoretically, that he would forget to transfer it from the coat he was wearing to the one he would wear. On the other hand, if he placed the lecture in the pocket of the suit in the bag
now,
he would, he knew, be tortured by the possibility of his luggage being stolen. On the third hand (these mental states sprout additional forelimbs all the time), he carried in the inside pocket of his present coat a precious wallet with two ten-dollar bills, the newspaper clipping of a letter he had, with my help, written to the
Times
in 1945 anent the Yalta conference, and his certificate of naturalization, and it was physically possible to pull out the wallet, if needed, in such a way as to fatally dislodge the folded lecture. During the twenty minutes he had been on the train, our friend had already opened his bag twice to play with his various papers. When the conductor reached the car, diligent Pnin was perusing with difficulty Betty’s latest effort, which began, “When we consider the mental climate wherein we all live, we cannot but notice—”

The conductor entered, did not awake the soldier, promised the women he would let them know when they were about to arrive, and presently was shaking his head over Pnin’s ticket. The Cremona stop had been abolished two years before.

“Important lecture!” cried Pnin. “What to do? It is a cata-stroph!”

Gravely, comfortably, the gray-headed conductor sank into the opposite seat and consulted in silence a tattered book full of dog-eared insertions. Finally he said that in a few minutes—namely, at three-eight—Pnin would have to get off at Whitchurch; this would enable him to catch the four-o’clock bus that would deposit him, around six, at Cremona.

“I was thinking I gained twelve minutes, and now I have lost nearly two whole hours,” said Pnin bitterly. Upon which, clearing his throat and ignoring the consolation offered by the kind gray-head (“You’ll make it”), he collected his stone-heavy bag and repaired to the vestibule of the car, to wait there for the confused greenery skimming by to be cancelled and replaced by the definite station he had in mind.

WHITCHURCH materialized as scheduled. A hot, torpid expanse of cement and sun lay beyond the geometrical solids of various clean-cut shadows. The local weather was unbelievably summery for October. Alert, Pnin entered a waiting room of sorts, with a needless stove in the middle, and looked around. In a solitary recess one could make out the upper part of a perspiring young man who was filling out forms on the broad wooden counter before him.

“Information, please,” said Pnin. “Where stops four-o’clock bus to Cremona?”

“Right across the street,” briskly answered the employee, without looking up.

“And where possible to leave baggage?”

“That bag? I’ll take care of it.”

And with the national informality that always nonplussed Pnin, the young man shoved the bag into a corner of his nook.

“Quittance?” queried Pnin, Englishing the Russian for “receipt”—“
kvitantzia.
”

“What’s that?”

“Number?” tried Pnin.

“You don’t need a number,” said the fellow, and resumed his writing.

Pnin left the station, satisfied himself about the bus stop, and entered a coffee shop. He consumed a ham sandwich, ordered another, and consumed that, too. At exactly five minutes to four, having paid for the food but not for an excellent toothpick, which he carefully selected from a neat little cup in the shape of a pine cone near the cash register, Pnin walked back to the station for his bag.

A different man was now in charge. The first had been called home, the new man explained, to drive his wife in all haste to the maternity hospital. He would be back in a few minutes.

“But I must obtain my valise!” cried Pnin.

The substitute was sorry but could not do a thing.

“It is there!” cried Pnin, leaning over and pointing.

This was unfortunate. He was still in the act of pointing when he realized that he was claiming the wrong bag. His index wavered. That hesitation was fatal.

“My bus to Cremona!” cried Pnin.

“There is another at eight,” said the man.

What was our poor friend to do? Horrible situation! He glanced streetward. The bus had just come. The engagement meant an extra fifty dollars. His hand flew to his right flank. It was there,
slava Bogu
(thank God)! Very well! He would not wear his black suit,
vot i vsyo
(that’s all). He would retrieve it on his way back. He had lost, dumped, shed many more valuable things in his day. Energetically, almost lightheartedly, Pnin boarded the bus.

He had endured this new stage of his journey for only a few city blocks when an awful suspicion crossed his mind. Ever since he had been separated from his bag, the tip of his left forefinger had been alternating with the proximal edge of his right elbow in checking a precious presence in his inside coat pocket. All of a sudden, he brutally yanked out the folded sheets. They were Betty’s paper.

Emitting what he thought were international exclamations of anxiety and entreaty, Pnin lurched out of his seat. Reeling, he reached the exit. With one hand, the driver grimly milked out a handful of coins from his little machine, refunded him the price of the ticket, and stopped the bus.

Poor Pnin landed in the middle of a strange town. He was less strong than his powerfully puffed-out chest might imply, and the wave of hopeless fatigue that suddenly submerged his top-heavy body, detaching him, as it were, from reality, was a sensation not utterly unknown to him. He found himself in a damp green park, of the formal and funereal type, with the stress laid on sombre rhododendrons, glossy laurels, sprayed shade trees, and closely clipped lawns, and hardly had he turned in to an alley of chestnut and oak, which the bus driver had curtly told him led back to the railway station, than that eerie feeling, that tingle of unreality, overpowered him completely. Was it something he had eaten? That pickle with the ham? Was it a mysterious disease that none of his doctors had yet detected? My friend wondered, and I wonder, too.

I DO not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced was something very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and pregnable. His chest hurt. He was sweating. He was terrified. A stone bench among the laurels saved him from collapsing on the sidewalk. Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For the nonce, I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it. My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart (“a hollow, muscular organ,” according to the gruesome definition in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin’s orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong, slimy, untouchable monster that one had to put up with, alas. Occasionally, when puzzled by his tumbling and tottering pulse, doctors had examined him more thoroughly, and the cardiograph had outlined fabulous mountain ranges and indicated a dozen fatal diseases that excluded one another. He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

And now, in the park of Whitchurch, Pnin felt what he had felt already on August 10, 1942, and May 18, 1937, and May 18, 1929, and July 4, 1920—that the repulsive automaton he lodged had developed a consciousness of its own, and not only was grossly alive but was causing him pain and panic. He pressed his poor bald head against the stone back of the bench and recalled all the past occasions of similar discomfort and despair. Could it be pneumonia this time? He had been chilled to the bone a couple of days before in one of those hearty American drafts that a host treats his guests to after the second round of drinks on a windy night. And then suddenly Pnin (was he dying?) found himself sliding back into his childhood. This sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that is said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals, especially in the former Russian Navy—a phenomenon of suffocation that a veteran psychoanalyst, whose name escapes me, has explained as being the subconsciously evoked shock of one’s baptism, which causes an explosion of intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last. It all happened in a flash, but there is no way of rendering it in less than so many consecutive words.

PNIN came from a respectable, fairly well-to-do St. Petersburg family. His father, Dr. Pavel Pnin, an eye specialist of some repute, had once had the honor of treating Leo Tolstoy for a case of conjunctivitis. Timofey’s mother, a frail, nervous little person with a waspy waist and bobbed hair, was the daughter of the once famous revolutionary Umov (rhymes with “zoom off”) and of a German lady from Riga. Through his half swoon, Pnin saw her approaching eyes. It was a Sunday in midwinter. He was eleven. He had been preparing lessons for his Monday classes at the First
Gymnasium
when a strange chill pervaded his body. His mother took his temperature, looked at her child with a kind of stupefaction, and immediately called her husband’s best friend, the pediatrician Sokolov. He was a small, beetle-browed man, with a short beard and a crew cut. Easing the skirts of his frock coat, he sat down on the edge of Timofey’s bed. A race was run between the Doctor’s fat golden watch and Timofey’s pulse (an easy winner). Then Timofey’s torso was bared, and to it the Doctor pressed the icy nudity of his ear and the sandpapery side of his head. Like the flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey’s back and chest, gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and then stomping on to the next. No sooner had the Doctor left than Timofey’s mother and a robust servant girl with safety pins between her teeth encased the distressed little patient in a strait-jacket-like compress. It consisted of a layer of soaked linen, a thicker layer of absorbent cotton, and another of tight flannel, with a sticky, diabolical oilcloth—the hue of urine and fever—coming between the clammy pang of the linen next to his skin and the excruciating squeak of the cotton around which the outer layer of flannel was wound. A poor cocooned pupa, Timosha (Tim) lay under a mass of additional blankets; they were of no avail against the branching chill that crept up his ribs from both sides of his frozen spine. He could not close his eyes because his eyelids stung so. Vision was but oval pain with oblique stabs of light; familiar shapes became the breeding places of evil delusions. Near his bed was a four-section screen of varnished wood, with pyrographic designs representing a lily pond, a bridle path felted with fallen leaves, an old man hunched up on a bench, and a squirrel holding a reddish object in its front paws. Timosha, a methodical child, had often wondered what that object could be (a nut? a pine cone?), and now that he had nothing else to do, he set himself to solve this dreary riddle, but the fever that hummed in his head drowned every effort in pain and panic. Still more oppressive was his tussle with the wallpaper. He had always been able to see that in the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a number of times with soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by the undismissible fact that he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of the pattern; that such a recurrence existed was proved by his being able to pick out here and there, all along the wall from bed to wardrobe and from stove to door, the reappearance of this or that element of the series, but when he tried travelling right or left from any chosen set of three inflorescences and seven leaves, he forthwith lost himself in a meaningless tangle of rhododendron and oak. It stood to reason that if the evil designer—the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever—had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Tim his everyday health, his everyday world, and this lucid—alas, too lucid—thought forced him to persevere in the struggle.