Look at the Harlequins! Page 10
I do not intend to bore you, glubokouva-zhaemaya (dear) Anna Ivanovna, and still less do I wish to crumple this third or fourth poor sheet with the crashing sound only punished paper can make; but the scene is not sufficiently abstract and schematic, so let me retake it.
I, your friend and employer Vadim Vadimovich, lying in bed on my back in ideal darkness (I got up a minute ago to recurtain the moon that peeped between the folds of two paragraphs), I imagine diurnal Vadim Vadimovich crossing a street from a bookshop to a sidewalk café. I am encased in my vertical self: not looking down but ahead, thus only indirectly aware of the blurry front of my corpulent figure, of the alternate points of my shoes, and of the rectangular form of the parcel under my arm. I imagine myself walking the twenty paces needed to reach the opposite sidewalk, then stopping with an unprintable curse and deciding to go back for the umbrella I left in the shop.
There is an affliction still lacking a name; there is, Anna (you must permit me to call you that, I am ten years your senior and very ill), something dreadfully wrong with my sense of direction, or rather my power over conceived space, because at this juncture I am unable to execute mentally, in the dark of my bed, the simple about-face (an act I perform without thinking in physical reality!) which would allow me to picture instantly in my mind the once already traversed asphalt as now being before me, and the vitrine of the bookshop being now within sight and not somewhere behind.
Let me dwell briefly on the procedure involved; on my inability to follow it consciously in my mind—my unwieldy and disobedient mind! In order to make myself imagine the pivotal process I have to force an opposite revolution of the decor: I must try, dear friend and assistant, to swing the entire length of the street, with the massive façades of its houses before and behind me, from one direction to another in the slow wrench of a half circle, which is like trying to turn the colossal tiller of a rusty recalcitrant rudder so as to transform oneself by conscious degrees from, say, an east-facing Vadim Vadimovich into a west-sun-blinded one. The mere thought of that action leads the bedded recliner to such a muddle and dizziness that one prefers scrapping the about-face altogether, wiping, so to speak, the slate of one’s vision, and beginning the return journey in one’s imagination as if it were an initial one, without any previous crossing of the street, and therefore without any of the intermediate horror—the horror of struggling with the steerage of space and crushing one’s chest in the process!
Voilà. Sounds rather tame, doesn’t it, en fait de démence, and, indeed, if I stop brooding over the thing, I decrease it to an insignificant flaw—the missing pinkie of a freak born with nine fingers. Considering it closer, however, I cannot help suspecting it to be a warning symptom, a foreglimpse of the mental malady that is known to affect eventually the entire brain. Even that malady may not be as imminent and grave as the storm signals suggest; I only want you to be aware of the situation before proposing to you, Annette. Do not write, do not phone, do not mention this letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear, in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli’s Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory.
On Friday afternoon, for the first time in two months she came “on the dot” as my American friends would say. A wedge of pain replaced my heart, and little black monsters started to play musical chairs all over my room, as I noticed that she wore her usual recent hat, of no interest or meaning. She took it off before the mirror and suddenly invoked Our Lord with rare emphasis.
“Ya idiotka,” she said. “I’m an idiot. I was looking for my pretty wreath, when papa started to read to me something about an ancestor of yours who quarreled with Peter the Terrible.”
“Ivan,” I said.
“I didn’t catch the name, but I saw I was late and pulled on (natsepila) this shapochka instead of the wreath, your wreath, the wreath you ordered.”
I was helping her out of her jacket. Her words filled me with dream-free wantonness. I embraced her. My mouth sought the hot hollow between neck and clavicle. It was a brief but thorough embrace, and I boiled over, discreetly, deliciously, merely by pressing myself against her, one hand cupping her firm little behind and the other feeling the harp strings of her ribs. She was trembling all over. An ardent but silly virgin, she did not understand why my grip had relaxed with the suddenness of sleep or windlorn sails.
Had she read only the beginning and end of my letter? Well, yes, she had skipped the poetical part. In other words, she had not the slightest idea what I was driving at? She promised, she said, to reread it. She had grasped, however, that I loved her? She had, but how could she be sure that I really loved her? I was so strange, so, so—she couldn’t express it—yes, STRANGE in every respect. She never had met anyone like me. Whom then did she meet, I inquired: trepanners? trombonists? astronomists? Well, mostly military men, if I wished to know, officers of Wrangel’s army, gentlemen, interesting people, who spoke of danger and duty, of bivouacs in the steppe. Oh, but look here, I too can speak of “deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks”—No, she said, they did not invent. They talked of spies they had hanged, they talked of international politics, of a new film or book that explained the meaning of life. And never one unchaste joke, not one horrid risqué comparison.… As in my books? Examples, examples! No, she would not give examples. She would not be pinned down to whirl on the pin like a wingless fly.
Or butterfly.
We were walking, one lovely morning, on the outskirts of Bellefontaine. Something flicked and lit.
“Look at that harlequin,” I murmured, pointing cautiously with my elbow.
Sunning itself against the white wall of a suburban garden was a flat, symmetrically outspread butterfly, which the artist had placed at a slight angle to the horizon of his picture. The creature was painted a smiling red with yellow intervals between black blotches; a row of blue crescents ran along the inside of the toothed wing margins. The only feature to rate a shiver of squeamishness was the glistening sweep of bronzy silks coming down on both sides of the beastie’s body.
“As a former kindergarten teacher I can tell you,” said helpful Annette, “that it’s a most ordinary nettlefly (krapivnitsa). How many little hands have plucked off its wings and brought them to me for approval!”
It flicked and was gone.
8
In view of the amount of typing to be done, and of her doing it so slowly and badly, she made me promise not to bother her with what Russians call “calf cuddlings” during work. At other times all she allowed me were controlled kisses and flexible holds: our first embrace had been “brutal” she said (having caught on very soon after that in the matter of certain male secrets). She did her best to conceal the melting, the helplessness that overwhelmed her in the natural course of caresses when she would begin to palpitate in my arms before pushing me away with a puritanical frown. Once the back of her hand chanced to brush against the taut front of my trousers; she uttered a chilly “pardon” (Fr.), and then went into a sulk upon my saying I hoped she had not hurt herself.
I complained of the ridiculous obsolete turn our relationship was taking. She thought it over and promised that as soon as we were “officially engaged,” we would enter a more modern era. I assured her I was ready to proclaim its advent any day, any moment.
She took me to see her parents with whom she shared a two-room apartment in Passy. He had been an army surgeon before the Revolution and, with his close-cropped gray head, clipped mustache, and neat imperial, bore a striking resemblance (abetted no doubt by the eager spirit that patches up worn parts of the past with new impressions of the same order) to the kindly but cold-fingered (and cold-earlobed) doctor who treated the “inflammation of the lungs” I had in the winter of 1907.
As with so many Russians émigrés of declining strength and lost profess
ions, it was hard to say what exactly were Dr. Blagovo’s personal resources. He seemed to spend life’s overcast evening either reading his way through sets of thick magazines (1830 to 1900 or 1850 to 1910), which Annette brought him from Oksman’s Lending Library, or sitting at a table and filling by means of a regularly clicking tobacco injector the semitransparent ends of carton-tubed cigarettes of which he never consumed more than thirty per day to avoid intercadence at night. He had practically no conversation and could not retell correctly any of the countless historical anecdotes he found in the battered tomes of Russkaya Starina (“Russian ancientry”)—which explains where Annette got her inability to remember the poems, the essays, the stories, the novels she had typed for me (my grumble is repetitious, I know, but the matter rankles—a word which comes from dracunculus, a “baby dragon”). He was also one of the last gentlemen I ever met who still wore a dickey and elastic-sided boots.
He asked me—and that remained his only memorable question—why I did not use in print the title which went with my thousand-year-old name. I replied that I was the kind of snob who assumes that bad readers are by nature aware of an author’s origins but who hopes that good readers will be more interested in his books than in his stemma. Dr. Blagovo was a stupid old bloke, and his detachable cuffs could have been cleaner; but today, in sorrowful retrospect, I treasure his memory: he was not only the father of my poor Annette, but also the grandfather of my adored and perhaps still more unfortunate daughter.
Dr. Blagovo (1867–1940) had married at the age of forty a provincial belle in the Volgan town of Kineshma, a few miles south from one of my most romantic country estates, famous for its wild ravines, now gravel pits or places of massacre, but then magnificent evocations of sunken gardens. She wore elaborate make-up and spoke in simpering accents, reducing nouns and adjectives to over-affectionate forms which even the Russian language, a recognized giant of diminutives, would only condone on the wet lips of an infant or tender nurse (“Here,” said Mrs. Blagovo “is your chaishko s molochishkom [teeny tea with weeny milk]”). She struck me as an extraordinarily garrulous, affable, and banal lady, with a good taste in clothes (she worked in a salon de couture). A certain tenseness could be sensed in the atmosphere of the household. Annette was obviously a difficult daughter. In the brief course of my visit I could not help noticing that the voice of the parent addressing her developed little notes of obsequious panic (notki podobostrastnoy paniki). Annette would occasionally curb with an opaque, almost ophidian, look, her mother’s volubility. As I was leaving, the old girl paid me what she thought was a compliment: “You speak Russian with a Parisian grasseyement and your manners are those of an Englishman.” Annette, behind her, uttered a low warning growl.
That same evening I wrote to her father informing him that she and I had decided to marry; and on the following afternoon, when she arrived for work, I met her in morocco slippers and silk dressing gown. It was a holiday—the Festival of Flora—I said, indicating, with a not wholly normal smile, the carnations, camomiles, anemones, asphodels, and blue cockles in blond corn, which decorated my room in our honor. Her gaze swept over the flowers, champagne, and caviar canapés; she snorted and turned to flee; I plucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key.
I do not mind recalling that our first tryst was a flop. It took me so long to persuade her that this was the day, and she made such a fuss about which ultimate inch of clothing could be removed and which parts of her body Venus, the Virgin, and the maire of our arrondissement allowed to be touched, that by the time I had her in a passably convenient position of surrender, I was an impotent wreck. We were lying naked, in a loose clinch. Presently her mouth opened against mine in her first free kiss. I regained my vigor. I hastened to possess her. She exclaimed I was disgustingly hurting her and with a vigorous wriggle expulsed the blooded and thrashing fish. When I tried to close her fingers around it in humble substitution, she snatched her hand away, calling me a dirty débauché (gryaznyy razvratnik). I had to demonstrate myself the messy act while she looked on in amazement and sorrow.
We did better next day, and finished the flattish champagne; I never could quite tame her, though. I remember most promising nights in Italian lakeside hotels when everything was suddenly botched by her misplaced primness. But on the other hand I am happy now that I was never so vile and inept as to ignore the exquisite contrast between her irritating prudery and those rare moments of sweet passion when her features acquired an expression of childish concentration, of solemn delight, and her little moans just reached the threshold of my undeserving consciousness.
9
By the end of the summer, and of the next chapter of The Dare, it became clear that Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regular Greek-Orthodox wedding—a taper-lit gold-and-gauze ceremony, with high priest and low priest and a double choir. I do not know if Annette was astonished when I said I intended to cut out the mummery and prosaically register our union before a municipal officer in Paris, London, Calais, or on one of the Channel Islands; but she certainly did not mind astonishing her parents. Dr. Blagovo requested an interview in a stiffly worded letter (“Prince! Anna has informed us that you would prefer—”); we settled for a telephone conversation: two minutes of Dr. Blagovo (including pauses caused by his deciphering a hand that must have been the despair of apothecaries) and five of his wife, who after rambling about irrelevant matters entreated me to reconsider my decision. I refused, and was set upon by a go-between, good old Stepanov, who rather unexpectedly, given his liberal views, urged me in a telephone call from somewhere in England (where the Borgs now lived) to keep up a beautiful Christian tradition. I changed the subject and begged him to arrange a beautiful literary soirée for me upon his return to Paris.
In the meantime some of the gayer gods came with gifts. Three windfalls scatter-thudded around me in a simultaneous act of celebration: The Red Topper was bought for publication in English with a two-hundred-guinea advance; James Lodge of New York offered for Camera Lucida an even handsomer sum (one’s sense of beauty was easily satisfied in those days); and a contract for the cinema rights to a short story was being prepared by Ivor Black’s half-brother in Los Angeles. I had now to find adequate surroundings for completing The Dare in greater comfort than that in which I wrote its first part; and immediately after that, or concurrently with its last chapter, I would have to examine, and, no doubt, revise heavily, the English translation now being made of my Krasnyy Tsilindr by an unknown lady in London (who rather inauspiciously had started to suggest, before a roar of rage stopped her, that “certain passages, not quite proper or too richly or obscurely phrased, would have to be toned down, or omitted altogether, for the benefit of the sober-minded English reader”). I also expected to have to face a business trip to the United States.
For some odd psychological reason, Annette’s parents, who kept track of those developments, were now urging her to go through no matter what form of marriage, civil or pagan (grazhdanskiy ili basurmanskiy), without delay. Once that little tricolor farce over, Annette and I paid our tribute to Russian tradition by traveling from hotel to hotel during two months, going as far as Venice and Ravenna, where I thought of Byron and translated Musset. Back in Paris, we rented a three-room apartment on the charming rue Guevara (named after an Andalusian playwright of long ago) a two-minute walk from the Bois. We usually lunched at the nearby Le Petit Diable Boiteux, a modest but excellent restaurant, and had cold cuts for dinner in our kitchenette. I had somehow expected Annette to be a versatile cook, and she did improve later, in rugged America. On rue Guevara her best achievement remained the Soft-Boiled Egg: I do not know how she did it, but she managed to prevent the fatal crack that produced an ectoplasmic swell in the dancing water when I took over.
She loved long walks in the park among the sedate beeches and the prospective-looking babes; she loved cafés, fashion shows, tennis matches, circular bike races at the Vélodrome, and especially the cinema. I soon realize
d that a little recreation put her in a lovemaking mood—and I was frightfully amorous and strong in our four last years in Paris, and quite unable to stand capricious denials. I drew the line, however, at an overdose of athletic sports—a metronomic tennis ball twanging to and fro or the ghastly hairy legs of hunchbacks on wheels.
The second part of the Thirties in Paris happened to be marked by a marvelous surge of the exiled arts, and it would be pretentious and foolish of me not to admit that whatever some of the more dishonest critics wrote about me, I stood at the peak of that period. In the halls where readings took place, in the back rooms of famous cafés, at private literary parties, I enjoyed pointing out to my quiet and stylish companion the various ghouls of the inferno, the crooks and the creeps, the benevolent nonentities, the groupists, the guru nuts, the pious pederasts, the lovely hysterical Lesbians, the gray-locked old realists, the talented, illiterate, intuitive new critics (Adam Atropovich was their unforgettable leader).
I noted with a sort of scholarly pleasure (like that of tracking down parallel readings) how attentive, how eager to honor her were the three or four, always black-suited, grandmasters of Russian letters (people I admired with grateful fervor, not only because their high-principled art had enchanted my prime, but also because the banishment of their books by the Bolshevists represented the greatest indictment, absolute and immortal, of Lenin’s and Stalin’s regime). No less empressés around her (perhaps in subliminal zeal to earn some of the rare praise I deigned to bestow on the pure voice of the impure) were certain younger writers whom their God had created two-faced: despicably corrupt or inane on one side of their being and shining with poignant genius on the other. In a word, her appearance in the beau monde of émigré literature echoed amusingly Chapter Eight of Eugene Onegin with Princess N.’s moving coolly through the fawning ballroom throng.