Look at the Harlequins! Read online

  No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a wreath on the cushion he held—and had to retreat growling as I shook my graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of course—my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my part)—and reworking so much of it in the margin—where inspiration finds its sweetest clover—that the whole had to be set anew. When the book made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo (where I had first “looked at the harlequins”) with its alley of fountains and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be that way.

  From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian literature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical but courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviews for my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds, and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing was it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing the smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing in pattering hordes to the lemming’s doom but presently all running back from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of my book but also their rodential Gadara.

  The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with her actual, unique traits—the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me. My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.

  None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness—which I had never felt before when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth—kept me back from submitting to Iris a tabulation of her charms. On the night of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it appeared in an émigré daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of the next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost’, which puts in a golden nutshell what English needs three words to express.

  My zabyváem chto vlyublyónnost’

  Ne prósto povorót litsá,

  A pod kupávami bezdónnost’,

  Nochnáy a pánika plovtsá.

  Pokúda snítsya, snís’, vlyublyónnost’,

  No probuzhdéniem ne múch’,

  I lúchshe nedogovoryónnost’

  Chem éta shchél’ i étot lúch.

  Napomináyu chto vlyublyónnost’

  Ne yáv’, chto métiny ne té,

  Chto mózhet-byt’ potustorónnost’

  Priotvorílas’ v temnoté.

  “Lovely,” said Iris. “Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?”

  “I have it here on the back. It goes like this. We forget—or rather tend to forget—that being in love (vlyublyonnost’) does not depend on the facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars, a swimmer’s panic in the night (here the iambic tetrameter happens to be rendered—last line of the first stanza, nochnáya pánika plovtsá). Next stanza: While the dreaming is good—in the sense of ‘while the going is good’—do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost’, but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam. Now comes the last stanza of this philosophical love poem.”

  “This what?”

  “Philosophical love poem. Napomináyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost’ is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (a moon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is, for instance, not the same kind of reality as a ceiling by day), and that, maybe, the hereafter stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilà.”

  “Your girl,” remarked Iris, “must be having a jolly good time in your company. Ah, here comes our breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The toast is all gone, I’m afraid. We thought you’d left hours ago.”

  She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And it went into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love.

  6

  After fifty summers, or ten thousand hours, of sunbathing in various countries, on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards, and balconies, I might have been unable to recall my novitiate in sensory detail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace to a pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, and literary life. Enormous amounts of Shaker’s Cold Cream were rubbed by kneeling and cooing Iris into my back as I lay prone on a rough towel in the blaze of the plage. Beneath my shut eyelids pressed to my forearm swam purple photomatic shapes: “Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetry of her touch—,” thus in my pocket diary, but I can improve upon my young preciosity. Through the itch of my skin, and in fact seasoned by that itch to an exquisite degree of rather ridiculous enjoyment, the touch of her hand on my shoulder blades and along my spine resembled too closely a deliberate caress not to be deliberate mimicry, and I could not curb a hidden response to those nimble fingers when in a final gratuitous flutter they traveled down to my very coccyx, before fading away.

  “There,” said Iris with exactly the same intonation as that used, at the end of a more special kind of treatment, by one of my Cambridge sweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.

  She, Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes and turned to her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds in the blue-green inward of every advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleek forebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam—and, oh, there it comes, the crested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, I understood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation, how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccable complexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile of her high cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the accroche-coeur of a sleek little flirt.

  “By the way,” said Iris as she changed from a kneeling to a half-recumbent position, her legs curled under her, “by the way, I have not apologized yet for my dismal remark about that poem. I now have reread your “Valley Blondies” (vlyublyonnost’) a hundred times, both the English for the matter and the Russian for the music. I think it’s an absolutely divine piece. Do you forgive me?”

  I pursed my lips to kiss the brown iridescent knee near me but her hand, as if measuring a child’s fever, palmed my forehead and stopped its advance.

  “We are watched,” she said, “by a number of eyes which seem to look everywhere except in our direction. The two nice English schoolteachers on my right—say, twenty paces away—have already told me that your resemblance to the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is a-houri-sang—they know a little French. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I’ll beg you to leave. I’ve been sufficiently hurt in my life.”

  A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When a girl starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience.

  Had I posted the poem to that émigré paper? Not yet; my garland of sonnets had had to be sent first. The two people (lowering my voice) on my left were fellow expatriates, judging by certain small indices. “Yes,” agreed Iris, “they practically got up to stand a
t attention when you started to recite that Pushkin thing about waves lying down in adoration at her feet. What other signs?”

  “He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked at the horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece.”

  There was also a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball in her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frilly harness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She was what in a later era amateurs were to call a “nymphet.” As she caught my glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under her auburn fringe.

  “At eleven or twelve,” said Iris, “I was as pretty as that French orphan. That’s her grandmother all in black sitting on a spread Cannice-Matin with her knitting. I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I played indecent games with Ivor—oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefers dons to donnas—at least that’s what he says.”

  She talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidence had died on the same day, she at seven A.M. in New York, he at noon in London, only two years ago. They had separated soon after the war. She was American and horrible. You don’t speak like that of your mother but she was really horrible. Dad was Vice President of the Samuels Cement Company when he died. He came from a respectable family and had “good connections.” I asked what grudge exactly did Ivor bear to “society” and vice versa? She vaguely replied he disliked the “fox-hunting set” and the “yachting crowd.” I said those were abominable clichés used only by Philistines. In my set, in my world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stood so far above any concept of “class” that we only laughed or yawned when reading about “Japanese Barons” or “New England Patricians.” Yet strangely enough Ivor stopped clowning and became a normal serious individual only when he straddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English “upper classes”—especially their pronunciation. It was, I remonstrated, a speech superior in quality to the best Parisian French, and even to a Petersburgan’s Russian; a delightfully modulated whinny, which both he and Iris were rather successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating in their everyday intercourse, when not making protracted fun of a harmless foreigner’s stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationality of the bronzed old man with the hoary chest hair who was wading out of the low surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog—I thought I knew his face.

  It was, she said, Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, his face and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for at least two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shaking itself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in June when the place was practically empty, and cut Ivor, though he knew young L.P. at Trinity. They’d now moved down there. Even more select. See that orange dot? That’s their cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew young P. and disliked him.

  Same day. Ran into him in the Mirana Men’s Room. Was effusively welcomed. Would I care to meet his sister, tomorrow is what? Saturday. Suggested they stroll over tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria. Sort of cove to your right. I’m there with friends. Of course you know Ivor Black. Young P. duly turned up, with lovely, long-limbed sister. Ivor—frightfully rude. Rise, Iris, you forget we are having tea with Rapallovich and Chicherini. That sort of stuff. Idiotic feuds. Lydia P. screamed with laughter.

  Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobster stage, I switched from a conservative caleçon de bain to a briefer variety (still banned at the time in stricter paradises). The delayed change resulted in a bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking into Iris’s room to contemplate myself in a full-length looking glass—the only one in the house—on a morning she had chosen for a visit to a beauty salon, which I called up to make sure she was there and not in the arms of a lover. Except for a Provençal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around, thus allowing me to indulge in one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures: circulating stark naked all over a strange house.

  The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rather contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures of exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmine equatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or less triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both sides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my face. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frightening repoussé, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man’s portable zoo, a symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin sea urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to the public.

  A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of my incurable ailment, “flayed consciousness,” were shoving aside my harlequins. I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love’s lavender-scented bedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du côté de chez Swann) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen in a Moïse basket, a color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquely inscribed as “The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, Cambridge 1919”; I mistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; a closer inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highly irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare’s flawed farce. But, then, Mnemosyne’s chromodiascope can also become a bore.

  In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys of the Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked me what sounded like “Hora?,” and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way and that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. He completely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupid head. It was a morning of errors and failures.

  I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the best breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery (we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.

  The litre of rouge I had visualized was there all right, but I could not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be heard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone. The editor of The New Aurora (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons, those editors) that his “modest émigré venture (nachinanie) “could not etc.—a crumpled “etc.” that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful, with Ivor’s Times under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffy room. The rioting in my brain had now started.

  It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, to preface tomorrow’s proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it unacceptable to my Iris.

  7

  If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leading through leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one saw the pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flag above, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency, between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of the road.

  On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch, overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosed patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of a cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On the left (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of rising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline of mountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, and somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.

  We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way to the village square and—from there by lovely shortcuts—to Cannice and the sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small but strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hocke
y, and climb rocks, and then shimmy till any pale mad hour (“do bezúmnogo blédnogo chása”—to quote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her “Indian” frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as I followed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, the all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moral decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.

  As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majestic wrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foam arrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we had been sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, that stateliness …

  Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.

  “Goodness,” said Iris, “I do hope that’s not a happy escapee from Kanner’s Circus.” (No relation—at least, so it seemed—to the pianist.)

  We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could identify—rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called “centuries”), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage, and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera, the silver louse.