The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  Kern’s skis creaked as he made his way up the slope. Noticing his broad shoulders, his equine profile, and the robust gloss on his cheekbones, the English girl he had met yesterday, the third day since his arrival, had taken him for a compatriot. Isabel, Airborne Isabel, as she was dubbed by a crowd of sleek and swarthy young men of the Argentine type, who scurried everywhere in her wake: to the hotel ballroom, up the padded stairs, along the snowy slopes in a play of sparkling dust. Her mien was airy and impetuous, her mouth so red it seemed the Creator had scooped up some torrid carmine and slapped a handful on the nether part of her face. Laughter flitted in her down-flecked eyes. A Spanish comb stood erect like a wing in the steep wave of her black, satin-sheeny hair. This was how Kern had seen her yesterday, when the slightly hollow din of the gong summoned her to dinner from Room 35. And the fact that they were neighbors, and that the number of her room was that of his years, and that she was seated across from him at the long table d’hôte, tall, vivacious, in a low-cut black dress, with a band of black silk on her bare neck—all this seemed so significant to Kern that it made a rift in the dull melancholy that had already oppressed him for half a year.

  It was Isabel who spoke first, and that did not surprise him. In this huge hotel that blazed, isolated, in a cleft between the mountains, life pulsed tipsy and lighthearted after the dead War years. Besides, to her, to Isabel, nothing was forbidden—not the sidelong flutter of eyelashes, not the melody of laughter in her voice as she said, handing Kern the ashtray, “I think you and I are the only English here,” and added, inclining tableward a translucent shoulder restrained by a black ribbonlike strap, “Not counting, of course, a half-dozen little old ladies, and that character over there with the turned-around collar.”

  Kern replied, “You’re mistaken. I have no homeland. It’s true I spent many years in London. Besides—”

  The next morning, after a half-year of indifference, he suddenly felt the pleasure of entering the deafening cone of an ice-cold shower. At nine, after a substantial and sensible breakfast, he crunched off on his skis across the reddish sand scattered on the naked glare of the path before the hotel veranda. When he had mounted the snowy slope, herringbone-style as befits a skier, there, amid checkered knickers and flushed faces, was Isabel.

  She greeted him English fashion—with but the flourish of a smile. Her skis were iridescent with olive-gold. Snow clung to the intricate straps that held her feet. There was an unfeminine strength about her feet and legs, shapely in their sturdy boots and tightly wound puttees. A purple shadow glided behind her along the crusty surface as, hands nonchalantly thrust into the pockets of her leather jacket and her left ski slightly advanced, she sped off down the slope, ever faster, scarf flying, amid sprays of powdered snow. Then, at full speed, she made a sharp turn with one knee deeply flexed, straightened again, and sped on, past the firs, past the turquoise skating rink. A pair of youths in colorful sweaters and a famous Swedish sportsman with a terra-cotta face and colorless, combed-back hair rushed past behind her.

  A little later Kern ran into her again near a bluish track along which people flashed with a faint clatter, belly-down on their flat sleds like woolly frogs. With a glint of her skis Isabel disappeared behind the bend of a snowbank, and when Kern, ashamed of his awkward movements, overtook her in a soft hollow amid silver-frosted boughs, she wiggled her fingers in the air, stamped her skis, and was off again. Kern stood for a time among the violet shadows, and suddenly felt a whiff of the familiar terror of silence. The lacework of the branches in the enamel-like air had the chill of a terrifying fairy tale. The trees, the intricate shadows, his own skis all looked strangely toylike. He realized that he was tired, that he had a blistered heel, and, snagging some protruding branches, he turned back. Skaters glided mechanically across the smooth turquoise. On the snow slope beyond, the terra-cotta Swede was helping up a snow-covered, lanky chap with horn-rimmed glasses, who was floundering in the sparkling powder like some awkward bird. Like a detached wing, a ski that had come off his foot was sliding down the hill.

  Back in his room, Kern changed and, at the sound of the gong’s hollow clanging, rang and ordered cold roast beef, some grapes, and a flask of Chianti.

  He had a nagging ache in his shoulders and thighs.

  Had no business chasing after her, he thought. A man sticks a pair of boards on his feet and proceeds to savor the law of gravity. Ridiculous.

  Around four he went down to the spacious reading room, where the mouth of the fireplace exhaled orange heat and invisible people sat in deep leather armchairs with their legs extending from under open newspapers. On a long oaken table lay a disorderly pile of magazines full of advertisements for toilet supplies, dancing girls, and parliamentary top hats. Kern picked out a ragged copy of the Tattler from the previous June and, for a long time, examined the smile of the woman who had, for seven years, been his wife. He recalled her dead face, which had become so cold and hard, and some letters he had found in a small box.

  He pushed aside the magazine, his fingernail squeaking on the glossy page.

  Then, moving his shoulders laboriously and wheezing on his short pipe, he went out onto the enormous enclosed veranda, where a chilled band was playing and people in bright scarves were drinking strong tea, ready to rush out again into the cold, onto the slopes that shone with a humming shimmer through the wide windowpanes. With searching eyes, he scanned the veranda. Somebody’s curious gaze pricked him like a needle touching the nerve of a tooth. He turned back abruptly.

  In the billiard room, which he had entered sidewise as the oak door yielded to his push, Monfiori, a pale, red-haired little fellow who recognized only the Bible and the carom, was bent over the emerald cloth, sliding his cue back and forth as he aimed at a ball. Kern had made his acquaintance recently, and the man had promptly showered him with citations from the Holy Scriptures. He said he was writing a major book in which he demonstrated that, if one construed the Book of Job in a certain way, then … But Kern had stopped listening, for his attention had suddenly been caught by his interlocutor’s ears—pointed ears, packed with canary-colored dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.

  The balls clicked and scattered. Raising his eyebrows, Monfiori proposed a game. He had melancholy, slightly bulbous, caprine eyes.

  Kern had already accepted, and had even rubbed some chalk on the tip of his cue, but, suddenly sensing a wave of dreadful ennui that made the pit of his stomach ache and his ears ring, said he had a pain in his elbow, glanced out as he passed a window at the mountains’ sugary sheen, and returned to the reading room.

  There, with his legs intertwined and one patent-leather shoe twitching, he again examined the pearl-gray photograph, the childlike eyes and shaded lips of the London beauty who had been his wife. The first night after her self-inflicted death he followed a woman who smiled at him on a foggy street corner, taking revenge on God, love, and fate.

  And now came this Isabel with that red smear for a mouth. If one could only …

  He clenched his teeth and the muscles of his strong jaws rippled. His entire past life seemed a shaky row of varicolored screens with which he shielded himself from cosmic drafts. Isabel was but the latest bright scrap. How many there had already been of these silk rags, and how he had tried to hang them across the gaping black gap! Voyages, books in delicate bindings, and seven years of ecstatic love. They billowed, these scraps, with the wind outside, tore, fell one by one. The gap cannot be hidden, the abyss breathes and sucks everything in. This he understood when the detective in suede gloves …

  Kern sensed that he was rocking back and forth, and that some pale girl with pink eyebrows was looking at him from behind a magazine. He took a Times from the table and opened the giant sheets. Paper bedspread across the chasm. People invent crimes, museums, games, only to escape from the unknown, from the vertiginous sky. And now this Isabel …

  He tossed the paper aside, rubbed his forehead with an enormous fist, and again felt someone’s wondering gaz
e on him. Then he slowly walked out of the room, past the reading feet, past the fireplace’s orange jaw. He lost his way in the resounding corridors, found himself in some hallway, where the white legs of a bowed chair were reflected by the parquet and a broad painting hung on the wall of William Tell piercing the apple on his son’s head; then he examined at length his clean-shaven, heavy face, the blood streaks on the whites of his eyes, his checked bow tie in the glistening mirror of a bright bathroom where water gurgled musically and a golden cigarette butt discarded by someone floated in the porcelain depths.

  Beyond the windows the snows were dimming and turning blue. Delicate hues illumined the sky. The flaps of the revolving door at the entrance to the din-filled vestibule slowly glinted as they admitted clouds of vapor and snorting, florid-faced people tired after their snowy games. The stairs breathed with footfalls, exclamations, laughter. Then the hotel grew still: everyone was dressing for dinner.

  Kern, who had fallen into a vague torpor in his armchair in his twilit room, was awakened by the gong’s vibrations. Reveling in his newfound energy, he turned on the lights, inserted cuff links into a fresh, starched shirt, extracted a flattened pair of black pants from under the squeaking press. Five minutes later, aware of a cool lightness, the firmness of the hair on the top of his head, and every detail of his well-creased clothes, he went down to the dining room.

  Isabel was not there. Soup was served, then fish, but she did not appear.

  Kern examined with revulsion the dull-bronzed youths, the brickhued face of an old woman with a beauty spot dissimulating a pimple, a man with goatish eyes, and fixed his gloomy gaze on a curly little pyramid of hyacinths in a green pot.

  She appeared only when, in the hall where William Tell hung, the instruments of a Negro band had started pounding and moaning.

  She smelled of chill air and perfume. Her hair looked moist. Something about her face stunned Kern.

  She smiled a brilliant smile, and adjusted the black ribbon on her translucent shoulder.

  “You know, I just got back. Barely had time to change and wolf down a sandwich.”

  Kern asked: “Don’t tell me you’ve been skiing all this time? Why, it’s completely dark out.”

  She gave him an intense look, and Kern realized what had astonished him: her eyes, which sparkled as if they were dusted with frost.

  Isabel began gliding softly along the dovelike vowels of English speech: “Of course. It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark, I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars.”

  “You might have killed yourself,” said Kern.

  She repeated, narrowing her downy eyes, “Right up into the stars,” and added, with a glint of her bare clavicle, “and now I want to dance.”

  The Negro band rattled and wailed in the hall. Japanese lanterns floated colorfully. Moving on tiptoe, alternating quick steps with suspended ones, his palm pressed to hers, Kern advanced, at close quarters, on Isabel. One step, and her slender leg would press into him; another, and she would resiliently yield. The fragrant freshness of her hair tickled his temple, and he could feel, under the edge of his right hand, the supple undulations of her bared back. With bated breath he would enter breaks in the music, then glide on from measure to measure.… Around him floated past the intense faces of angular couples with perversely absent eyes. And the opaque song of the strings was punctuated by the patter of primitive little hammers.

  The music accelerated, swelled, and ended with a clatter. Everything stopped. Then came applause, demanding more of the same. But the musicians had decided to have a rest.

  Pulling a handkerchief out of his cuff and mopping his brow, Kern set off after Isabel, who, with a flutter of her black fan, was heading for the door. They sat down side by side on some wide stairs.

  Not looking at him, she said, “Sorry—I had the feeling I was still amid the snow and stars. I didn’t even notice whether you danced well or not.”

  Kern glanced at her as if not hearing, and she was indeed immersed in her own radiant thoughts, thoughts unknown to him.

  One step lower sat a youth in a very narrow jacket and a skinny girl with a birthmark on her shoulder blade. When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston. Kern had to dance with the skinny girl. She smelled of slightly sour lavender. Colored paper streamers swirled out through the hall, tangling themselves about the dancers. One of the musicians stuck on a white mustache, and for some reason Kern felt ashamed for him. When the dance was over he abandoned his partner and rushed off in search of Isabel. She was nowhere to be seen—not at the buffet nor on the staircase.

  That’s it—bedtime, was Kern’s terse thought.

  Back in his room he held the drape aside before lying down, and, without thinking, looked into the night. Reflections of windows lay on the dark snow in front of the hotel. In the distance, the metallic summits floated in a funereal radiance.

  He had the sensation he had glanced into death. He pulled the folds together tightly so that not a ray of night could leak into the room. But when he switched off the light and lay down, he noticed a glint coming from the edge of a glass shelf. He got up and fiddled a long time around the window, cursing the splashes of moonlight. The floor was cold as marble.

  When Kern loosened the cord of his pajamas and closed his eyes, slippery slopes started to rush beneath him. A hollow pounding began in his heart, as if it had kept silent all day and was now taking advantage of the quiet. He began feeling frightened as he listened to this pounding. He recalled how once, on a very windy day, he was passing a butcher’s shop with his wife, and a carcass rocked on its hook with a dull thudding against the wall. That was how his heart felt now. His wife, meanwhile, had her eyes narrowed against the wind and was holding her hat as she said that the wind and the sea were driving her crazy, that they must leave, they must leave.…

  Kern rolled over onto his other side—gingerly, so his chest would not burst from the convex blows.

  “Can’t go on like this,” he mumbled into the pillow, forlornly folding up his legs. He lay for a while on his back peering at the ceiling, at the wan gleams that had penetrated, as piercing as his ribs.

  When his eyes closed again, silent sparks started to glide in front of him, then infinitely unwinding transparent spirals. Isabel’s snowy eyes and fiery mouth flashed past, then came sparks and spirals again. For an instant his heart retracted into a lacerating knot. Then it swelled and gave a thump.

  Can’t go on like this, I’ll go crazy. No future, just a black wall. There’s nothing left.

  He had the impression that the paper streamers were slithering down his face, rustling and ripping into narrow shreds. And the Japanese lanterns flowed with colored undulations in the parquet. He was dancing, advancing.

  If I could just unclench her, flip her open.… And then …

  And death seemed to him like a gliding dream, a fluffy fall. No thoughts, no palpitations, no aches.

  The lunar ribs on the ceiling had imperceptibly moved. Footfalls passed quietly along the corridor, a lock clicked somewhere, a soft ringing flew past; then footfalls again, the mutter and murmur of footfalls.

  That means the ball is over, thought Kern. He turned his stuffy pillow over.

  Now, all around, there was an immense, gradually cooling silence. Only his heart oscillated, taut and heavy. Kern groped on the bedside table, located the pitcher, took a swallow from the spout. An icy streamlet scalded his neck and collarbone.

  He started thinking of methods to induce sleep. He imagined waves rhythmically running up onto a shoreline. Then plump gray sheep slowly tumbling over a fence. One sheep, two, three …

  Isabel is asleep next door, thought Kern. Isabel is asleep, wearing yellow pajamas, probably. Yellow becomes her. Spanish color. If I scratched on the wall with my fingernail she’d hear me. Damned palpitations …

  He fell asleep at the very moment he had begun trying to decide whether there was any point in turning on the light and read
ing something for a while. There’s a French novel lying on the armchair. The ivory knife glides, cutting the pages. One, two …

  He came to in the middle of the room, awakened by a sense of unbearable horror. The horror had knocked him off the bed. He had dreamt that the wall next to which stood his bed had begun slowly collapsing onto him—so he had recoiled with a spasmodic exhalation.

  Kern found the headboard by touch, and would have gone back to sleep immediately if it had not been for a noise he heard through the wall. He did not understand right away where this noise was coming from, and the act of straining his hearing made his consciousness, which was ready to glide down the slope of sleep, abruptly grow lucid. The noise occurred again: a twang, followed by the rich sonority of guitar strings.

  Kern remembered—it was Isabel who was in the next room. Right away, as if in response to his thought, came a peal of her laughter. Twice, thrice, the guitar throbbed and dissolved. Then an odd, intermittent bark sounded and ceased.

  Seated on his bed, Kern listened in wonder. He pictured a bizarre scene: Isabel with a guitar and a huge Great Dane looking up at her with blissful eyes. He put his ear to the chilly wall. The bark rang out again, the guitar twanged as from a fillip, and a strange rustle began undulating as if an ample wind were whirling there in the next room. The rustle stretched out into a low whistle, and once again the night filled with silence. Then a frame banged—Isabel had shut the window.

  Indefatigable girl, he thought—the dog, the guitar, the icy drafts.

  Now all was quiet. Having expelled all those noises from her room, Isabel had probably gone to bed and was now asleep.

  “Damn it! I don’t understand anything. I don’t have anything. Damn it, damn it,” moaned Kern, burying himself in the pillow. A leaden fatigue was compressing his temples. His legs ached and tingled unbearably. He groaned in the darkness for a long time, turning heavily from side to side. The rays on the ceiling were long since extinguished.