Look at the Harlequins! (27 page)

Now comes a snaggy bit: I do not know if my eyes remained always wide open “in a glazed look of arrogant stupor” as imagined by a reporter who got as far as the corridor desk. But I doubt very much I could blink—and without the oil of blinking the motor of sight could hardly have run. Yet, somehow, during my glide down those illusory canals and cloudways, and right over another continent, I did glimpse off and on, through subpalpebral mirages, the shadow of a hand or the glint of an instrument.
As to my world of sound, it remained solid fantasy. I heard strangers discuss in droning voices all the books I had written or thought I had written, for everything they mentioned, titles, the names of characters, every phrase they shouted was preposterously distorted by the delirium of demonic scholarship. Louise regaled the company with one of her good stories—those I called “name hangers” because they only
seemed
to reach this or that point—a
quid pro quo
, say, at a party—but were really meant to introduce some high-born “old friend” of hers, or a glamorous politician, or a cousin of that politician. Learned papers were read at fantastic symposiums. In the year of grace 1798, Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev, a gifted young poet, was heard chuckling as he composed his Ossianic pastiche
Slovo o polku Igoreve
. Somewhere in Abyssinia drunken Rimbaud was reciting to a surprised Russian traveler the poem
Le Tramway ivre
(…
En blouse rouge, à face en pis de vache, le bourreau me trancha la tête aussi
…). Or else I’d hear the pressed repeater hiss in a pocket of my brain and tell the time, the rime, the meter that who could dream I’d hear again?

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

To the best of my knowledge my Christian name was Vadim; so was my father’s. The U.S.A. passport recently issued me—an elegant booklet with a golden design on its green cover perforated by the number 00678638—did not mention my ancestral title; this had figured, though, on my British passport, throughout its several editions. Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, before the last one was mutilated beyond recognition by friendly forgers, practical jokers at heart. All this I re-gleaned one night, as certain brain cells, which had been frozen, now bloomed anew. Others, however, still puckered like retarded buds, and although I could freely twiddle (for the first time since I collapsed) my toes under the bedclothes, I just could not make out in that darker corner of my mind what surname came after my Russian patronymic. I felt it began with an
N
, as did the term for the beautifully spontaneous arrangement of words at moments of inspiration like the rouleaux of red corpuscles in freshly drawn blood under the microscope—a word I once used in
See under Real
, but could not remember either, something to do with a roll of coins, capitalistic metaphor, eh, Marxy? Yes, I definitely felt my family name began with an
N
and bore an odious resemblance to the surname or pseudonym of a presumably
notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, or Babylonian, or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained
émigrés
from some other galaxy constantly confused me; but whether it was something on the lines of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simply could not tell. I preferred not to overtax my willpower (go away, Naborcroft) and so gave up trying—or perhaps it began with a
B
and the
n
just clung to it like some desperate parasite? (Bonidze? Blonsky?—No, that belonged to the BINT business.) Did I have some princely Caucasian blood? Why had allusions to a Mr. Nabarro, a British politician, cropped up among the clippings I received from England concerning the London edition of
A Kingdom by the Sea
(lovely lilting title)? Why did Ivor call me “Mac-Nab”?

Without a name I remained unreal in regained consciousness. Poor Vivian, poor Vadim Vadimovich, was but a figment of somebody’s—not even my own—imagination. One dire detail: in rapid Russian speech longish name-and-patronymic combinations undergo familiar slurrings: thus “Pavel Pavlovich,” Paul, son of Paul, when casually interpellated is made to sound like “Pahlpahlych” and the hardly utterable, tapeworm-long “Vladimir Vladimirovich” becomes colloquially similar to “Vadim Vadimych.”

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

There remained other problems. Where was I? What about a little light? How did one tell by touch a lamp’s button from a bell’s button in the dark. What was, apart from my own identity, that other person, promised to me, belonging to me? I could locate the bluish blinds of twin windows. Why not uncurtain them?

—if “paralysis” is not too strong a word for the condition that mimicked it (with some obscure help from the patient): a rather quaint but not too serious psychological disorder—or at least so it seemed in lighthearted retrospect.

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

One of the windows was wide open when I woke up. My mind and my eye were by now sufficiently keen to make out the medicaments on my bedside table. Amidst its miserable population I noticed a few stranded travelers from another world: a transparent envelope with a non-masculine handkerchief found and laundered by the staff; a diminutive golden pencil belonging to the eyelet of a congeric agenda in a vanity bag; a pair of harlequin sunglasses, which for some reason suggested not protection from a harsh light but the masking of tear-swollen lids. The combination of those ingredients resulted in a dazzling pyrotechny of sense; and next moment (coincidence was still on my side) the door of my room moved: a small soundless move that came to a brief soundless stop and then was continued in a slow, infinitely slow sequence of suspension dots in diamond type. I emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered.

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

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

Meaning she would not marry a madman?

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

Explain.

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

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

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

“His mistake,” she continued, “his morbid mistake is quite simple. He has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means time. His impressions along the HP route (dog overtakes ball, car pulls up at next villa) refer to a series of time events, and not to blocks of painted space that a child can rearrange in any old way. It has taken him time—even if only a few moments—to cover distance HP in thought. By the time he reaches P he has accumulated duration, he is saddled with it! Why then is it so extraordinary that he cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible.
Reverse motion is used in films only for comic effects—the resurrection of a smashed bottle of beer—

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

“That’s all very well,” I said, as I groped for the levers of my wheelchair, and you helped me to roll back to my room. “And I’m grateful, I’m touched, I’m cured! Your explanation, however, is merely an exquisite quibble—and you know it; but never mind, the notion of trying to twirl time is a
trouvaille;
it resembles (kissing the hand resting on my sleeve) the neat formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until (yawning, crawling back into bed) until the next chap snatches the chalk. I had been promised some rum with my tea—Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)—”

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley College, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel
Lolita
(1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated several of his original English works—including
Lolita
—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

BOOKS BY
V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV

ADA, OR ARDOR

Ada, or Ardor
tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0

BEND SINISTER

While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay,
Bend Sinister
is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication,
Despair
is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1

THE ENCHANTER

The Enchanter
is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel,
Lolita
. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3

THE EYE

The Eye
is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1