The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  2

  The next day Isabel did not appear until lunchtime.

  Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike. Then snow began falling, slowly and vertically. The dense flakes, like ornamental spots on a white veil, curtained the view of the mountains, the heavily laden firs, the dulled turquoise of the rink. The plump, soft particles of snow rustled against the windowpanes, falling, falling without end. If one watched them for long, one had the impression the entire hotel was slowly drifting upward.

  “I was so tired last night,” Isabel was saying to her neighbor, a young man with a high olive forehead and piercing eyes, “so tired I decided to loll in bed.”

  “You look stunning today,” drawled the young man with exotic courtesy.

  She inflated her nostrils derisively.

  Looking at her through the hyacinths, Kern said coldly, “I didn’t know, Miss Isabel, that you had a dog in your room, as well as a guitar.”

  Her downy eyes seemed to narrow even more, against a breeze of embarrassment. Then she beamed with a smile, all carmine and ivory.

  “You overdid it on the dance floor last night, Mr. Kern,” she replied. The olive youth and the little fellow who recognized only Bible and billiards laughed, the first with a hearty ha-ha, the second very softly, with raised eyebrows.

  Kern said with a frown, “I’d like to ask you not to play at night. I don’t have an easy time falling asleep.”

  Isabel slashed his face with a rapid, radiant glance.

  “You had better ask your dreams, not me, about that.”

  And she began talking to her neighbor about the next day’s ski competition.

  For some minutes already Kern had felt his lips stretching into a spasmodic, uncontrollable sneer. It twitched agonizingly in the corners of his mouth, and he suddenly felt like yanking the tablecloth off the table, hurling the pot with the hyacinths against the wall.

  He rose, trying to conceal his unbearable tremor, and, seeing no one, went out of the room.

  “What’s happening to me,” he questioned his anguish. “What’s going on here?”

  He kicked his suitcase open and started packing. He immediately felt dizzy. He stopped and again began pacing the room. Angrily he stuffed his short pipe. He sat down in the armchair by the window, beyond which the snow was falling with nauseating regularity.

  He had come to this hotel, to this wintry, stylish nook called Zermatt, in order to fuse the sensation of white silence with the pleasure of lighthearted, motley encounters, for total solitude was what he feared most. But now he understood that human faces were also intolerable to him, that the snow made his head ring, and that he lacked the inspired vitality and tender perseverance without which passion is powerless. While for Isabel, probably, life consisted of a splendid ski run, of impetuous laughter, of perfume and frosty air.

  Who is she? A heliotype diva, broken free? Or the runaway daughter of a swaggering, bilious lord? Or just one of those women from Paris … And where does her money come from? Slightly vulgar thought …

  She does have the dog, though, and it’s pointless for her to deny it. Some sleek-haired Great Dane. With a cold nose and warm ears. Still snowing, too, Kern thought haphazardly. And, in my suitcase—a spring seemed to pop open, with a clink, in his brain—I have a Parabellum.

  Until evening he again ambled about the hotel, or made dry rustling noises with the newspapers in the reading room. From the vestibule window he saw Isabel, the Swede, and several young men with jackets pulled on over fringed sweaters getting into a swanlike curved sleigh. The roan horses made their merry harnesses ring. The snow was falling silent and dense. Isabel, all spangled with small white stars, was shouting and laughing amid her companions. And when the sled started with a jerk and sped off, she rocked backward, clapping her fur-mittened hands in the air.

  Kern turned away from the window.

  Go ahead, enjoy your ride.… It makes no difference.…

  Then, during dinner, he tried not to look at her. She was filled with a merry, festive gaiety, and paid no attention to him. At nine the Negro music began moaning and clattering again. Kern, in a state of feverish languor, was standing by the doorjamb, gazing at the clinched couples and at Isabel’s curly fan.

  A soft voice said next to his ear, “Would you care to go to the bar?”

  He turned and saw the melancholy caprine eyes, the ears with their reddish fuzz.

  Amid the crimson penumbra of the bar the glass tables reflected the flounces of the lampshades.

  On high stools at the metal counter sat three men, all three wearing white gaiters, their legs retracted, sucking through straws on bright-colored drinks. On the other side of the bar, where varicolored bottles sparkled on the shelves like a collection of convex beetles, a fleshy, black-mustachioed man in a cherry-colored dinner jacket was mixing cocktails with extraordinary dexterity. Kern and Monfiori selected a table in the bar’s velvet depths. A waiter opened a long list of beverages, gingerly and reverently, like an antiquary exhibiting a precious book.

  “We’re going to have a glass of each in succession,” said Monfiori in his melancholy, slightly hollow voice, “and when we get to the end we’ll start over, choosing only the ones we found to our liking. Perhaps we’ll stop at one and keep savoring it for a long time. Then we’ll go back to the beginning again.”

  He gave the waiter a pensive look. “Is that clear?”

  The part in the waiter’s hair tipped forward.

  “This is known as the roaming of Bacchus,” Monfiori told Kern with a doleful chuckle. “Some people approach their daily life in the same way.”

  Kern stifled a tremulous yawn. “You know this ends by making you throw up.”

  Monfiori sighed, swigged, smacked his lips, and marked the first item on the list with an X, using an automatic pencil. Two deep furrows ran from the wings of his nose to the corners of his thin mouth.

  After his third glass Kern lit a cigarette in silence. After his sixth drink—an oversweet concoction of chocolate and champagne—he had the urge to talk.

  He exhaled a megaphone of smoke. Narrowing his eyes, he tapped the ashes from his cigarette with a yellowed nail.

  “Tell me, Monfiori, what do you think of this—what’s her name—Isabel?”

  “You’ll get nowhere with her,” replied Monfiori. “She belongs to the slippery species. All she seeks is fleeting contact.”

  “But she plays the guitar at night, and fusses with her dog. That’s not good, is it?” said Kern, goggling his eyes at his glass.

  With another sigh, Monfiori said, “Why don’t you drop her. After all …”

  “Sounds to me like envy—” began Kern.

  The other quietly interrupted him: “She’s a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes.” Clearing his throat modestly, he made another X.

  The ruby drinks were replaced by golden ones. Kern had the feeling his blood was turning sweet. His head was growing foggy. The white spats left the bar. The drumming and crooning of the distant music ceased.

  “You say one must be selective …,” he spoke thickly and limply, “while I have reached a point … Listen to this, for instance—I once had a wife. She fell in love with someone else. He turned out to be a thief He stole cars, necklaces, furs.… And she poisoned herself. With strychnine.”

  “And do you believe in God?” asked Monfiori with the air of a man getting on his hobby horse. “There is God, after all.”

  Kern gave an artificial laugh.

  “Biblical God.… Gaseous vertebrate.… I am not a believer.”

  “That’s from Huxley,” insinuatingly observed Monfiori. “There was a biblical God, though.… The point is that He is not alone; there are numerous biblical Gods.… A host. My favorite one is … ‘He sneezes and there is light. He has eyes like the eyelashes of dawn.’ Do you understand what this means? Do you? And there is more: ‘… the fleshy parts of his body are solidly interconnected, and they won’t budge.’ Well? Wel
l? Do you understand?”

  “Wait a minute,” shouted Kern.

  “No, no—you must think about it. ‘He transforms the sea into a seething ointment; he leaves behind a trail of radiance; the abyss is akin to a patch of gray hair!’ ”

  “Wait, will you,” interrupted Kern. “I want to tell you that I have decided to kill myself.…”

  Monfiori gave him an opaque, attentive look, covering his glass with his palm. He was silent for a time.

  “Just as I thought,” he began with unexpected gentleness. “Tonight, as you were watching the people dancing, and before that, when you got up from the table … There was something about your face … The crease between the brows … That special one … I understood right away …” He fell silent, caressing the table’s edge.

  “Listen to what I’m going to tell you,” he continued, lowering his heavy, purplish eyelids with their wartlike lashes. “I search everywhere for the likes of you—in expensive hotels, on trains, in seaside resorts, at night on the quays of big cities.” A dreamy little sneer fleeted across his lips.

  “I recall, in Florence once …” He raised his doelike eyes. “Listen, Kern—I’d like to be present when you do it.… May I?”

  Kern, in a numb slouch, sensed a chill in his chest under his starched shirt. We’re both drunk, the words rushed through his brain, and he’s spooky.

  “May I?” repeated Monfiori with a pout, “Pretty please?” (touch of clammy, hairy little hand).

  With a jerk and a groggy sway Kern rose from his chair.

  “Go to hell! Let me out.… I was joking.…”

  The attentive gaze of Monfiori’s leechy eyes did not waver.

  “I’ve had enough of you! I’ve had enough of everything.” Kern dashed off with a splashlike gesture of his hands. Monfiori’s gaze came unstuck with what seemed like a smack.

  “Murk! Puppet!… Wordplay!… Basta!…”

  He banged his hip painfully on the edge of the table. The raspberry fatty behind his vacillating bar puffed out his white shirtfront and began to float, as though in a curved mirror, amid his bottles. Kern traversed the gliding ripples of the carpet and, with his shoulder, shoved a falling glass door.

  The hotel was fast asleep. Mounting the cushiony stairs with difficulty, he located his room. A key protruded from the adjoining door. Someone had forgotten to lock himself in. Flowers meandered in the dim light of the corridor. Once he was in his room he spent a long time groping along the wall in search of the light switch. Then he collapsed into an armchair by the window.

  It struck him that he must write certain letters, farewell letters. But the syrupy drinks had weakened him. His ears filled with a dense, hollow din, and gelid waves breathed on his brow. He had to write a letter, and there was something else troubling him. As if he had left home and forgotten his wallet. The mirrory blackness of the window reflected his stripelike collar and his pale forehead. He had splashed some intoxicating drops on his shirtfront. He must write that letter … no, that wasn’t it. Suddenly something flashed in his mind’s eye. The key! The key protruding from the neighboring door.…

  Kern rose ponderously and went out into the dimly lit corridor. From the enormous key dangled a shiny wafer with the number 35. He stopped in front of this white door. There was an avid tremor in his legs.

  A frosty wind lashed his brow. The window of the spacious, illuminated bedroom was wide open. On the wide bed, in open-collared yellow pajamas, Isabel lay supine. A pale hand drooped, with a smouldering cigarette between its fingers. Sleep must have overcome her without warning.

  Kern approached the bed. He banged his knee against a chair, on which a guitar uttered a faint twang. Isabel’s blue hair lay in tight circles on the pillow. He took a look at her dark eyelids, at the delicate shadow between her breasts. He touched the blanket. Her eyes opened immediately. Then, in a hunchbacked kind of stance, Kern said: “I need your love. Tomorrow I shall shoot myself.”

  He had never dreamt that a woman, even if taken by surprise, could be so startled. First Isabel remained motionless, then she lunged, looking back at the open window, slipping instantly from the bed, and rushed past Kern with bowed head, as if expecting a blow from above.

  The door slammed. Some sheets of letter paper fluttered from the table.

  Kern remained standing in the middle of the spacious bright room. Some grapes glowed purple and gold on the night table.

  “Madwoman,” he said aloud.

  He laboriously shifted his shoulders. Like a steed he trembled with a prolonged shiver from the cold. Then, suddenly, he froze motionless.

  Outside the window, swelling, flying, a joyous barking sound approached by agitated jolts. In a wink the square of black night in the window opening filled and came aboil with solid, boisterous fur. In one broad and noisy sweep this roughish fur obscured the night sky from one window frame to the other. Another instant and it swelled tensely, obliquely burst in, and unfolded. Amid the whistling spread of agitated fur flashed a white face. Kern grabbed the guitar by its finger-board and, with all his strength, struck the white face flying at him. Like some fluffy tempest, the giant wing’s rib knocked him off his feet. He was overwhelmed by an animal smell. Kern rose with a lurch.

  In the center of the room lay an enormous angel.

  He occupied the entire room, the entire hotel, the entire world. His right wing had bent, leaning its angle against the mirrored dresser. The left one swung ponderously, catching on the legs of an overturned chair. The chair banged back and forth on the floor. The brown fur of the wings steamed, iridescent with frost. Deafened by the blow, the angel propped itself on its palms like a sphinx. Blue veins swelled on its white hands, and hollows of shadow showed on its shoulders next to the clavicles. Its elongated, myopic-looking eyes, pale-green like predawn air, gazed at Kern without blinking from beneath straight, joined brows.

  Suffocating from the pungent odor of wet fur, Kern stood motionless in the apathy of ultimate fear, examining the giant, steamy wings and the white face.

  A hollow din began beyond the door in the corridor, and Kern was overcome by a different emotion: heart-rending shame. He was ashamed to the point of pain, of horror, that in a moment someone might come in and find him and this incredible creature.

  The angel heaved a noisy breath, moved. But his arms had grown weak, and he collapsed on his chest. A wing jerked. Grinding his teeth, trying not to look, Kern stooped over him, took hold of the mound of damp, odorous fur and the cold, sticky shoulders. He noticed with sickening horror that the angel’s feet were pale and boneless, and that he would be unable to stand on them. The angel did not resist. Kern hurriedly pulled him toward the wardrobe, flung open the mirrored door, began pushing and squeezing the wings into the creaking depths. He seized them by their ribs, trying to bend them and pack them in. Unfurling flaps of fur kept slapping him in the chest. At last he closed the door with a solid shove. At that instant there came a lacerating, unbearable shriek, the shriek of an animal crushed by a wheel. He had slammed the door on one of the wings, that was it. A small corner of the wing protruded from the crack. Opening the door slightly, Kern shoved the curly wedge in with his hand. He turned the key.

  It grew very quiet. Kern felt hot tears running down his face. He took a breath and rushed for the corridor. Isabel lay next to the wall, a cowering heap of black silk. He gathered her in his arms, carried her into his room, and lowered her onto the bed. Then he snatched from his suitcase the heavy Parabellum, slammed the clip home, ran out holding his breath, and burst into Room 35.

  The two halves of a broken plate lay, all white, on the carpet. The grapes were scattered.

  Kern saw himself in the mirrored door of the wardrobe: a lock of hair fallen over an eyebrow, a starched dress shirtfront spattered with red, the lengthwise glint of the pistol’s barrel.

  “Must finish it off,” he exclaimed tonelessly, and opened the wardrobe.

  There was nothing but a gust of odorous fluff. Oily brown tufts eddying
about the room. The wardrobe was empty. On its floor lay a white squashed hatbox.

  Kern approached the window and looked out. Furry little clouds were gliding across the moon and breathing dim rainbows around it. He shut the casements, put the chair back in its place, and kicked some brown tufts under the bed. Then he cautiously went out into the corridor. It was quiet as before. People sleep soundly in mountain hotels.

  And when he returned to his room what he saw was Isabel with her bare feet hanging from the bed, trembling, with her head between her hands. He felt ashamed, as he had, not long ago, when the angel was looking at him with its odd greenish eyes.

  “Tell me, where is he?” asked Isabel breathlessly.

  Kern turned away, went to the desk, sat down, opened the blotter, and replied, “I don’t know.”

  Isabel retracted her bare feet onto the bed.

  “May I stay here with you for now? I’m so frightened.…”

  Kern gave a silent nod. Dominating the tremor of his hand, he started writing. Isabel began speaking again, in an agitated, toneless voice, but for some reason it appeared to Kern that her fright was of the female, earthly variety.

  “I met him yesterday as I was flying on my skis in the dark. Last night he came to me.”

  Trying not to listen, Kern wrote in a bold hand:

  “My dear friend, this is my last letter. I could never forget how you helped me when disaster crashed down on me. He probably lives on a peak where he hunts alpine eagles and feeds on their meat.…”

  Catching himself, he slashed that out and took another sheet. Isabel was sobbing with her face buried in the pillow.

  “What shall I do now? He’ll come after me for revenge.… Oh, my God.…”

  “My dear friend,” Kern wrote quickly, “she sought unforgettable caresses and now she will give birth to a winged little beast.…” Oh, damn! He crumpled the sheet.