The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  After dinner, when I went outside to meet you, my head began to whirl from the crisp air and the torrents of yellow sunlight. Every ray echoed in my temples. Large, rustling, russet leaves waddled as they raced along the sidewalk.

  I reflected while I walked that you would probably not come to the rendezvous. And that, if you did, we would quarrel again anyway. I knew only how to sculpt and how to love. This was not enough for you.

  The massive gates. Wide-hipped buses squeezing through the portals and rolling on down the boulevard, which receded into the restless blue glitter of the windy day. I waited for you under an oppressive vault, between chilly columns, near the grate of the guardhouse window. People everywhere: Berlin clerks were leaving their offices, ill-shaven, each with a briefcase under his arm and, in his eyes, the turbid nausea that comes when you smoke a bad cigar on an empty stomach—their weary, predatory faces, their high starched collars, flashed by endlessly; a woman passed with a red straw hat and a gray karakul coat; then a youth in velvet pants buttoned under the knees; and others still.

  I waited, leaning on my cane, in the cold shadow of the corner columns. I did not believe you would come.

  By one of the columns, near the guardhouse window, was a stand with postcards, maps, fan-spreads of colored photos, and by it on a stool sat a brown little old woman, short-legged, plump, with a round, speckled face, and she too was waiting.

  I wondered which of us would wait longer, and who would come first—a customer, or you. The old woman’s mien conveyed something like this: “I just happen to be here.… I sat down for a minute.… Yes, there’s some kind of stand nearby, with excellent, curious knickknacks.… But I have nothing to do with it.…”

  People passed ceaselessly between the columns, skirting the corner of the guardhouse; some glanced at the postcards. The old woman would tense every nerve and fix her bright tiny eyes on the passerby, as if transmitting a thought: Buy it, buy it.… But the other, after a quick survey of the colored cards and the gray ones, walked on, and she, with seeming indifference, lowered her eyes and went back to the red book she was holding in her lap.

  I did not believe you would come. But I waited for you as I had never waited before, smoking restlessly, peeking beyond the gate toward the uncluttered plaza at the start of the boulevard; then I would retreat anew into my nook, trying not to give the appearance of waiting, trying to imagine that you were walking, approaching while I was not looking, that if I took another peek around that corner I would see your seal-fur coat and the black lace hanging from your hat brim down over your eyes—and I deliberately did not look, cherishing the self-deception.

  There was a rush of cold wind. The woman got up and started pushing her postcards more firmly into their slots. She wore a kind of yellow velours jacket with gathers at the waist. The hem of her brown skirt was hiked up higher in front than in back, which made her look as if she were thrusting out her belly when she walked. I could make out meek, kindhearted creases on her round little hat and her worn duck bootees. She was busily arranging her tray of wares. Her book, a guide to Berlin, lay on the stool, and the autumn wind absently turned the pages and ruffled the map that had fallen out from them like a flight of stairs.

  I was getting cold. My cigarette smouldered lopsidedly and bitterly. I felt the waves of a hostile chill on my chest. No customer had appeared.

  Meanwhile the knickknack woman got back on her perch and, since the stool was too tall for her, she had to do some squirming, with the soles of her blunt bootees leaving the sidewalk by turns. I tossed away the cigarette and flicked it with the end of my cane, provoking a fiery spray.

  An hour had passed already, maybe more. How could I think you would come? The sky had imperceptibly turned into one continuous storm cloud, the passersby walked even faster, hunched over, holding on to their hats, and a lady who was crossing the square opened her umbrella as she went. It would be a real miracle if you were to arrive now.

  The old woman had meticulously placed a marker in her book and paused as if lost in thought. My guess is she was conjuring up a rich foreigner from the Adlon Hotel who would buy all her wares, and overpay, and order more, many more picture postcards and guidebooks of all kinds. And she probably was not very warm either in that velours jacket. You had promised you would come. I remembered the phone call, and the fleeting shadow of your voice. God, how I wanted to see you. The ill wind started gusting again. I turned up my collar.

  Suddenly the window of the guardhouse opened, and a green soldier hailed the old woman. She quickly scrambled down from her stool and, with her thrust-out belly, scuttled up to the window. With a relaxed motion, the soldier handed her a streaming mug and closed the sash. His green shoulder turned and withdrew into the murky depths.

  Gingerly carrying the mug, the woman returned to her seat. It was coffee with milk, judging by the brown fringe of skin sticking to the rim.

  Then she began drinking. I have never seen a person drink with such utter, profound, concentrated relish. She forgot her stand, the postcards, the chill wind, her American client, she just sipped, sucked, disappeared totally into her coffee—exactly as I forgot about my vigil and saw only the velours jacket, the bliss-dimmed eyes, the stubby hands clutching the mug in their woolen mittens. She drank for a long time, drank in slow swallows, reverently licking off the fringe of skin, heating her palms on the warm tin. And a dark, sweet warmth poured into my soul. My soul, too, was drinking and heating itself, and the brown little woman tasted of coffee with milk.

  She finished. For a moment she paused, motionless. Then she rose and headed for the window to return the mug.

  But she stopped halfway, and her lips gathered into a little smile. She scuttled rapidly back to her stand, snatched up two colored postcards, and, hurrying back to the iron grille of the window, softly tapped on the glass with her small woolly fist. The grille opened, a green sleeve glided out, with a gleaming button on the cuff, and she thrust mug and cards into the dark window with a series of hasty nods. The soldier, examining the photographs, turned away into the interior, slowly shutting the sash behind him.

  Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.

  And at that instant you arrived at last—or, rather, not you but a German couple, he in a raincoat, legs in long stockings like green bottles; she slender and tall, in a panther coat. They approached the stand, the man began selecting, and my little old coffeewoman, flushed, puffed up, looked now into his eyes, now at the cards, fussing, moving her eyebrows tensely like an old cabbie urging on his nag with his whole body. But the German had barely had time to pick something out when, with a shrug of her shoulder, his wife tugged him away by the sleeve. It was then I noticed that she resembled you. The similarity was not in the features, not in the clothes, but in that squeamish, unkind grimace, in that cursory, indifferent glance. The two of them walked on without buying anything, and the old woman only smiled, replaced her postcards in their slots, and again became absorbed in her red book. There was no point in waiting any longer. I departed along darkening streets, peering into the faces of passersby, capturing smiles and amazing little motions—the bobbing of a girl’s pigtail as she tossed a ball against a wall, the heavenly melancholy reflected in a horse’s purplish, oval eye. I captured and collected all of it. The oblique, plump raindrops grew more frequent, and I recalled the cool coziness of my studio, the muscles, foreheads, and strands of hair that I had modeled, and felt in my fingers the subtle tingle of my thought starting to sculp
t.

  It grew dark. The rain was gusting. The wind greeted me turbulently at every corner. Then a streetcar clanged past, its windows agleam with amber, its interior filled with black silhouettes. I hopped aboard as it passed and began drying my rain-soaked hands.

  The people in the car looked sullen and swayed sleepily. The black windowpanes were specked with a multitude of minute raindrops, like a night sky overcast with a beadwork of stars. We were clattering along a street lined with noisy chestnut trees, and I kept imagining that the humid boughs were lashing the windows. And when the tram halted one could hear, overhead, the chestnuts plucked by the wind knocking against the roof. Knock—then again, resiliently, gently: knock, knock. The tram would chime and start, the gleam of the streetlamps shattered in the wet glass, and, with a sensation of poignant happiness, I awaited the repetition of those meek, lofty sounds. The brakes slammed on for a stop. Again a round, solitary chestnut dropped, and, after a moment, another thumped and rolled along the roof: knock, knock.…

  DETAILS OF A SUNSET

  THE last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and, along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering, sped into the distance like a blue star. “Well, might as well just plod along, even though you are pretty drunk, Mark, pretty drunk.…”

  The spark went out. The roofs glistened in the moonlight, silvery angles broken by oblique black cracks.

  Through this mirrory darkness he staggered home: Mark Standfuss, a salesclerk, a demigod, fair-haired Mark, a lucky fellow with a high starched collar. At the back of his neck, above the white line of that collar, his hair ended in a funny, boyish little tag that had escaped the barber’s scissors. That little tag was what made Klara fall in love with him, and she swore that it was true love, that she had quite forgotten the handsome ruined foreigner who last year had rented a room from her mother, Frau Heise.

  “And yet, Mark, you’re drunk.…”

  That evening there had been beer and songs with friends in honor of Mark and russet-haired, pale Klara, and in a week they would be married; then there would be a lifetime of bliss and peace, and of nights with her, the red blaze of her hair spreading all over the pillow, and, in the morning, again her quiet laughter, the green dress, the coolness of her bare arms.

  In the middle of a square stood a black wigwam: the tram tracks were being repaired. He remembered how today he had got under her short sleeve, and kissed the touching scar from her smallpox vaccination. And now he was walking home, unsteady on his feet from too much happiness and too much drink, swinging his slender cane, and among the dark houses on the opposite side of the empty street a night echo clop-clopped in time with his footfalls; but grew silent when he turned at the corner where the same man as always, in apron and peaked cap, stood by his grill, selling frankfurters, crying out in a tender and sad birdlike whistle: “Würstchen, Würstchen …”

  Mark felt a sort of delicious pity for the frankfurters, the moon, the blue spark that had receded along the wire, and, as he tensed his body against a friendly fence, he was overcome with laughter, and, bending, exhaled into a little round hole in the boards the words “Klara, Klara, oh my darling!”

  On the other side of the fence, in a gap between the buildings, was a rectangular vacant lot. Several moving vans stood there like enormous coffins. They were bloated from their loads. Heaven knows what was piled inside them. Oakwood trunks, probably, and chandeliers like iron spiders, and the heavy skeleton of a double bed. The moon cast a hard glare on the vans. To the left of the lot, huge black hearts were flattened against a bare rear wall—the shadows, many times magnified, of the leaves of a linden tree that stood next to a streetlamp on the edge of the sidewalk.

  Mark was still chuckling as he climbed the dark stairs to his floor. He reached the final step, but mistakenly raised his foot again, and it came down awkwardly with a bang. While he was groping in the dark in search of the keyhole, his bamboo cane slipped out from under his arm and, with a subdued little clatter, slid down the staircase. Mark held his breath. He thought the cane would turn with the stairs and knock its way down to the bottom. But the high-pitched wooden click abruptly ceased. Must have stopped. He grinned with relief and, holding on to the banister (the beer singing in his hollow head), started to descend again. He nearly fell, and sat down heavily on a step, as he groped around with his hands.

  Upstairs the door onto the landing opened. Frau Standfuss, with a kerosene lamp in her hand, half-dressed, eyes blinking, the haze of her hair showing from beneath her nightcap, came out and called, “Is that you, Mark?”

  A yellow wedge of light encompassed the banisters, the stairs, and his cane, and Mark, panting and pleased, climbed up again to the landing, and his black, hunchbacked shadow followed him up along the wall.

  Then, in the dimly lit room, divided by a red screen, the following conversation took place:

  “You’ve had too much to drink, Mark.”

  “No, no, Mother … I’m so happy …”

  “You’ve got yourself all dirty, Mark. Your hand is black.…”

  “… so very happy.… Ah, that feels good … water’s nice and cold. Pour some on the top of my head … more.… Everybody congratulated me, and with good reason.… Pour some more on.”

  “But they say she was in love with somebody else such a short time ago—a foreign adventurer of some kind. Left without paying five marks he owed Frau Heise.…”

  “Oh, stop—you don’t understand anything.… We did such a lot of singing today.… Look, I’ve lost a button.… I think they’ll double my salary when I get married.…”

  “Come on, go to bed.… You’re all dirty, and your new pants too.”

  That night Mark had an unpleasant dream. He saw his late father. His father came up to him, with an odd smile on his pale, sweaty face, seized Mark under the arms, and began to tickle him silently, violently, and relentlessly.

  He only remembered that dream after he had arrived at the store where he worked, and he remembered it because a friend of his, jolly Adolf, poked him in the ribs. For one instant something flew open in his soul, momentarily froze still in surprise, and slammed shut. Then again everything became easy and limpid, and the neckties he offered his customers smiled brightly, in sympathy with his happiness. He knew he would see Klara that evening—he would only run home for dinner, then go straight to her house.… The other day, when he was telling her how cozily and tenderly they would live, she had suddenly burst into tears. Of course Mark had understood that these were tears of joy (as she herself explained); she began whirling about the room, her skirt like a green sail, and then she started rapidly smoothing her glossy hair, the color of apricot jam, in front of the mirror. And her face was pale and bewildered, also from happiness, of course. It was all so natural, after all.…

  “A striped one? Why certainly.”

  He knotted the tie on his hand, and turned it this way and that, enticing the customer. Nimbly he opened the flat cardboard boxes.…

  Meanwhile his mother had a visitor: Frau Heise. She had come without warning, and her face was tear-stained. Gingerly, almost as if she were afraid of breaking into pieces, she lowered herself onto a stool in the tiny, spotless kitchen where Frau Standfuss was washing the dishes. A two-dimensional wooden pig hung on the wall, and a half-open matchbox with one burnt match lay on the stove.

  “I have come to you with bad news, Frau Standfuss.”

  The other woman froze, clutching a plate to her chest.

  “It’s about Klara. Yes. She has lost her senses. That lodger of mine came back today—you know, the one I told you about. And Klara has gone mad. Yes, it all happened this morning.… She never wants to see your son again.… You gave her the material for a new dress; it will be returned to you. And here is a letter for Mark. Klara’s gone mad. I don’t know what to think.…”

  Meanwhile Mark had finished work and was already on his way home. Crew-cut Adolf walked him all the way to his house. They
both stopped, shook hands, and Mark gave a shove with his shoulder to the door which opened into cool emptiness.

  “Why go home? The heck with it. Let’s have a bite somewhere, you and I.” Adolf stood, propping himself on his cane as if it were a tail. “The heck with it, Mark.…”

  Mark gave his cheek an irresolute rub, then laughed. “All right. Only it’s my treat.”

  When, half an hour later, he came out of the pub and said goodbye to his friend, the flush of a fiery sunset filled the vista of the canal, and a rain-streaked bridge in the distance was margined by a narrow rim of gold along which passed tiny black figures.

  He glanced at his watch and decided to go straight to his fiancée’s without stopping at his mother’s. His happiness and the limpidity of the evening air made his head spin a little. An arrow of bright copper struck the lacquered shoe of a fop jumping out of a car. The puddles, which still had not dried, surrounded by the bruise of dark damp (the live eyes of the asphalt), reflected the soft incandescence of the evening. The houses were as gray as ever; yet the roofs, the moldings above the upper floors, the gilt-edged lightning rods, the stone cupolas, the colonnettes—which nobody notices during the day, for day people seldom look up—were now bathed in rich ochre, the sunset’s airy warmth, and thus they seemed unexpected and magical, those upper protrusions, balconies, cornices, pillars, contrasting sharply, because of their tawny brilliance, with the drab façades beneath.

  Oh, how happy I am, Mark kept musing, how everything around celebrates my happiness.