Pnin (4 page)

Technically speaking, the narrator’s art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. When Joan, in her brisk long-limbed way, got to the compelling instrument before it gave up, and said hullo (eyebrows up, eyes roaming), a hollow quiet greeted her; all she could hear was the informal sound of a steady breathing; presently the breather’s voice said, with a cozy foreign accent: “One moment, excuse me”—this was quite casual, and he continued to breathe and perhaps hem and hum or even sigh a little to the accompaniment of a crepitation that evoked the turning over of small pages.

“Hullo!” she repeated.

“You are,” suggested the voice warily, “Mrs. Fire?”

“No,” said Joan, and hung up. “And besides,” she went on, swinging back into the kitchen and addressing her husband who was sampling the bacon she had prepared for herself, “you cannot deny that Jack Cockerell considers Blorenge to be a first-rate administrator.”

“What was that telephone call?”

“Somebody wanting Mrs. Feuer or Fayer. Look here, if you deliberately neglect everything George—” [Dr. O. G. Helm, their family doctor]

“Joan,” said Laurence, who felt much better after that opalescent rasher, “Joan, my dear, you are aware, aren’t you, that you told Margaret Thayer yesterday you wanted a roomer?”

“Oh, gosh,” said Joan—and obligingly the telephone rang again.

“It is evident,” said the same voice, comfortably resuming the conversation, “that I employed by mistake the name of the informer. I am connected with Mrs. Clement?”

“Yes, this is Mrs. Clements,” said Joan.

“Here speaks Professor—” There followed a preposterous little explosion. “I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs. Fire, who is now working at the library part time—”

“Yes—Mrs. Thayer, I know. Well, do you want to see that room?”

He did. Could he come to inspect it in approximately half an hour? Yes, she would be in. Untenderly she cradled the receiver.

“What was it this time?” asked her husband, looking back, pudgy freckled hand on banister, on his way upstairs to the security of his study.

“A cracked ping-pong ball. Russian.”

“Professor Pnin, by God!” cried Laurence. “ ‘I know him well: he is the brooch—’ Well, I flatly refuse to have that freak in my house.”

He trudged up, truculently. She called after him:

“Lore, did you finish writing that article last night?”

“Almost.” He had turned the corner of the stairs—she heard his hand squeaking on the banisters, then striking them. “I will today. First I have that damned EOS examination to prepare.”

This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day:
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Half an hour later, Joan glanced over the moribund cactuses in the sun-porch window and saw a raincoated, hatless man, with a head like a polished globe of copper, optimistically ringing at the front door of her neighbor’s beautiful brick house. The old Scotty stood beside him in much the same candid attitude as he. Miss Dingwall came out with a mop, let the slowpoke, dignified dog in, and directed Pnin to the Clements’ clapboard residence.

Timofey Pnin settled down in the living room, crossed his legs
po amerikanski
(the American way), and entered into some unnecessary detail. It was a curriculum vitae in a nutshell—a coconut shell. Born in St. Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Was with the White Army five months, first as a “field telephonist,” then at the Military Information Office. Escaped from Red-invaded Crimea to Constantinople in 1919. Completed university education—

“Say, I was there as a child exactly the same year,” said pleased Joan. “My father went to Turkey on a government mission and took us along. We might have met! I remember the word for water. And there was a rose garden—”

“Water in Turkish is ‘su,’ ” said Pnin, a linguist by necessity, and went on with his fascinating past: Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific institutions. Then—“Well, to make a long story very short: habitated in Paris from
1925, abandoned France at beginning of Hitler war. Is now here. Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such like subjects at Vandal College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all references. Or from the College Home for Single Instructors.”

Hadn’t he been comfortable there?

“Too many people,” said Pnin. “Inquisitive people. Whereas special privacy is now to me absolutely necessary.” He coughed into his fist with an unexpected cavernous sound (which somehow reminded Joan of a professional Don Cossack she had once met) and then took the plunge: “I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation.”

“Well, come upstairs,” said Joan brightly.

Pnin peered into Isabel’s pink-walled, white-flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass. Methodically Pnin inspected Hoecker’s “Girl with a Cat” above the bed, and Hunt’s “The Belated Kid” above the bookshelf. Then he held his hand at a little distance from the window.

“Is temperature uniform?”

Joan dashed to the radiator.

“Piping hot,” she reported.

“I am asking—are there currents of air?”

“Oh yes, you will have plenty of air. And here is the bathroom—small, but all yours.”

“No
douche
?” inquired Pnin, looking up. “Maybe it is better so. My friend, Professor Chateau of Columbia, once broke his leg in two places. Now I must think. What price are you prepared to demand? I ask it,
because I will not give more than a dollar per day—not including, of course, nootrition.”

“All right,” said Joan with that pleasant, quick laugh of hers.

The same afternoon, one of Pnin’s students, Charles McBeth (“A madman, I think, judging by his compositions,” Pnin used to say), zestfully brought over Pnin’s luggage in a pathologically purplish car with no fenders on the left side, and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure, our friend applied himself to the pleasant task of Pninizing his new quarters. Isabel’s adolescence had gone with her, or, if not, had been eradicated by her mother, but traces of the girl’s childhood somehow had been allowed to remain, and before finding the most advantageous situations for his elaborate sun lamp, huge Russian-alphabet typewriter in a broken coffin fixed with Scotch tape, five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with ten shoe trees rooted in them, a coffee grinding-and-boiling contraption which was not quite as good as the one that had exploded last year, a couple of alarm clocks running the same race every night, and seventy-four library books, mainly old Russian periodicals solidly bound by WCL, Pnin delicately exiled to a chair on the landing half a dozen forlorn volumes, such as
Birds at Home, Happy Days in Holland
, and
My First Dictionary
(“With more than 600 illustrations depicting zoos, the human body, farms, fires—all scientifically chosen”), and also a lone wooden bead with a hole through the center.

Joan, who used the word “pathetic” perhaps a little too often, declared she would ask that pathetic savant
for a drink with their guests, to which her husband replied he was also a pathetic savant and would go to a movie if she carried out her threat. However, when Joan went up to Pnin with her offer he declined the invitation, saying, rather simply, he had resolved not to use alcohol any more. Three couples and Entwistle arrived around nine, and by ten the little party was in full swing, when suddenly Joan, while talking to pretty Gwen Cockerell, noticed Pnin, in a green sweater, standing in the doorway that led to the foot of the stairs and holding aloft, for her to see, a tumbler. She sped toward him—and simultaneously her husband almost collided with her as he trotted across the room to stop, choke, abolish Jack Cockerell, head of the English Department, who, with his back to Pnin, was entertaining Mrs. Hagen and Mrs. Blorenge with his famous act-he being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, mimics of Pnin on the campus. His model, in the meantime, was saying to Joan: “This is not a clean glass in the bathroom, and there exist other troubles. It blows from the floor, and it blows from the walls—” But Dr. Hagen, a pleasant, rectangular old man, had noticed Pnin, too, and was greeting him joyfully, and the next moment Pnin, his tumbler replaced by a highball, was being introduced to Professor Entwistle.

“
Zdrastvuyte kak pozhivaete horosho spasibo
” Entwistle rattled off in excellent imitation of Russian speech—and indeed he rather resembled a genial Tsarist colonel in mufti. “One night in Paris,” he went on, his eyes twinkling, “at the
Ougolok
cabaret, this demonstration convinced a group of Russian revelers that I was a compatriot of theirs—posing as an American, don’t you know.”

“In two-three years,” said Pnin, missing one bus but boarding the next, “I will also be taken for an American,” and everybody roared except Professor Blorenge.

“Well get you an electric heater,” Joan told Pnin confidentially, as she offered him some olives.

“What make heater?” asked Pnin suspiciously.

“That remains to be seen. Any other complaints?”

“Yes—sonic disturbance,” said Pnin. “I hear every, every sound from downstairs, but now it is not the place to discuss it, I think.”

The guests started to leave. Pnin trudged upstairs, a clean glass in his hand. Entwistle and his host were the last to come out on the porch. Wet snow drifted in the black night.

“It’s such a pity,” said Professor Entwistle, “that we cannot tempt you to come to Goldwin for good. We have Schwarz and old Crates, who are among your greatest admirers. We have a real lake. We have everything. We even have a Professor Pnin on our staff.”

“I know, I know,” said Clements, “but these offers I keep getting are coming too late. I plan to retire soon, and till then I prefer to remain in the musty but familiar hole. How did you like”—he lowered his voice—“Monsieur Blorenge?”

“Oh, he struck me as a capital fellow. In some ways, however, I must say he reminded me of that probably legendary figure, the Chairman of French, who thought Chateaubriand was a famous
chef
.”

“Careful,” said Clements. “That story was first told about Blorenge, and is true.”

Next morning heroic Pnin marched to town, walking a cane in the European manner (up-down, up-down) and letting his gaze dwell upon various objects in a philosophical effort to imagine what it would be to see them again after the ordeal and then recall what it had been to perceive them through the prism of its expectation. Two hours later he was trudging back, leaning on his cane and not looking at anything. A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.

There were, as per plan, no lectures, nor did he attend the examinations given for him by Miller. Ten days passed—and suddenly he began to enjoy the new gadget. It was a revelation, it was a sunrise, it was a firm mouthful of efficient, alabastrine, humane America. At night he kept his treasure in a special glass of special fluid where it smiled to itself, pink and pearly,
as perfect as some lovely representative of deep-sea flora. The great work on Old Russia, a wonderful dream mixture of folklore, poetry, social history, and
petite histoire
, which for the last ten years or so he had been fondly planning, now seemed accessible at last, with headaches gone, and this new amphitheater of translucid plastics implying, as it were, a stage and a performance. When the spring term began his class could not help noticing the sea change, as he sat coquettishly tapping with the rubber end of a pencil upon those even, too even, incisors and canines while some student translated some sentence in old and ruddy Professor Oliver Bradstreet Mann’s
Elementary Russian
(actually written from beginning to end by two frail drudges, John and Olga Krotki, both dead today), such as “The boy is playing with his nurse and his uncle.” And one evening he waylaid Laurence Clements, who was in the act of scuttling up to his study, and with incoherent exclamations of triumph started to demonstrate the beauty of the thing, the ease with which it could be taken out and put in again, and urged surprised but not unfriendly Laurence to have all his teeth out first thing tomorrow.

“You will be a reformed man like I,” cried Pnin.

It should be said for both Laurence and Joan that rather soon they began to appreciate Pnin at his unique Pninian worth, and this despite the fact that he was more of a poltergeist than a lodger. He did something fatal to his new heater and gloomily said never mind, it would soon be spring now. He had an irritating way of standing on the landing and assiduously brushing his clothes there, the brush clinking against the buttons, for at least five minutes every blessed morning. He had
a passionate intrigue with Joan’s washing machine. Although forbidden to come near it, he would be caught trespassing again and again. Casting aside all decorum and caution, he would feed it anything that happened to be at hand, his handkerchief, kitchen towels, a heap of shorts and shirts smuggled down from his room, just for the joy of watching through that porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers. One Sunday, after checking the solitude, he could not resist, out of sheer scientific curiosity, giving the mighty machine a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes stained with clay and chlorophyll to play with; the shoes tramped away with a dreadful arhythmic sound, like an army going over a bridge, and came back without their soles, and Joan appeared from her little sitting room behind the pantry and said in sadness, “Again, Timofey?” But she forgave him, and liked to sit with him at the kitchen table, both cracking nuts or drinking tea. Desdemona, the old colored charwoman, who came on Fridays and with whom at one time God had gossiped daily (“ ‘Desdemona,’ the Lord would say to me, ‘that man George is no good.’ ”), happened to glimpse Pnin basking in the unearthly lilac light of his sun lamp, wearing nothing but shorts, dark glasses, and a dazzling Greek-Catholic cross on his broad chest, and insisted thereafter that he was a saint. Laurence, on going up to his study one day, a secret and sacred lair cunningly carved out of the attic, was incensed to find the mellow lights on and fat-naped Pnin braced on his thin legs serenely browsing in a corner: “Excuse me, I only am grazing,” as the gentle intruder (whose English was growing richer at a surprising pace) remarked, glancing over the higher of his two shoulders;
but somehow that very afternoon a chance reference to a rare author, a passing allusion tacitly recognized in the middle distance of an idea, an adventurous sail descried on the horizon, led insensibly to a tender mental concord between the two men, both of whom were really at ease only in their warm world of natural scholarship. There are human solids and there are human surds, and Clements and Pnin belonged to the latter variety. Thenceforth they would often devise, as they met and stopped on thresholds, on landings, on two different levels of staircase steps (exchanging altitudes and turning to each other anew), or as they walked in opposite directions up and down a room which at the moment existed for them only as an
espace meublé
, to use a Pninian term. It soon transpired that Timofey was a veritable encyclopedia of Russian shrugs and shakes, had tabulated them, and could add something to Laurence’s files on the philosophical interpretation of pictorial and non-pictorial, national and environmental gestures. It was very pleasant to see the two men discuss a legend or a religion, Timofey blossoming out in amphoric motion, Laurence chopping away with one hand. Laurence even made a film of what Timofey considered to be the essentials of Russian “carpalistics,” with Pnin in a polo shirt, a Gioconda smile on his lips, demonstrating the movements underlying such Russian verbs—used in reference to hands—as
mahnut’, vsplesnut’, razvesti:
the one-hand downward loose shake of weary relinquishment; the two-hand dramatic splash of amazed distress; and the “disjunctive” motion—hands traveling apart to signify helpless passivity. And in conclusion, very slowly, Pnin showed how, in the international “shaking the finger” gesture, a half
turn, as delicate as the switch of the wrist in fencing, metamorphosed the Russian solemn symbol of pointing up, “the Judge in Heaven sees you!” into a German air picture of the stick—“something is coming to you!” “However,” added objective Pnin, “Russian metaphysical police can break physical bones also very well.”