Despair (24 page)

“See here, wild boar! This is a state of things that cannot endure. I want you to perish not because you are a killer, but because you are the meanest of mean scoundrels, using for your mean ends the innocence of a credulous young woman, whom, as it is, ten years of dwelling in your private hell have dazed and torn to pieces. If, nevertheless, there is still a chink in your blackness: give yourself up!”

I should leave this letter without any comments. The fair-minded reader of my previous chapters could not have failed to note the genial tone, the kindliness of my attitude towards Ardalion; and that is how the man repaid me. But let it go,
let it go.… Better to think he wrote that disgusting letter in his cups—otherwise it is really too much out of shape, too wide of truth, too full of libelous assertions, the absurdity of which will be easily seen by the same attentive reader. To call my gay, empty, and not very bright Lydia a “woman frightened out of her wits,” or—what was his other expression?—“torn to pieces”; to hint at some kind of trouble between her and me, coming almost to cheek-slapping; really, really, that is a bit thick—I scarcely know in what words to describe it. There are no such words. My correspondent has already used them all up—though, true, in another connection. And just because I had of late been fondly supposing that I had passed the supreme limit of possible pain, injury, anxiety of mind, I now came into so dreadful a state whilst reading that letter over, such a fit of trembling possessed my body, that all things around me started shaking: the table; the tumbler on the table; even the mousetrap in a corner of my new room.

But suddenly I slapped my brow and burst out laughing. How simple it all was! How simply, said I to myself, the mysterious frenzy of that letter has now been solved. A proprietor’s frenzy! Ardalion cannot forgive my having taken
his
name for cipher and staging the murder on
his
strip of earth. He is mistaken; all are gone bankrupt long ago; nobody knows whom this earth really belongs to—and … Ah, enough, enough about my fool Ardalion! The ultimate dab is laid on his portrait. With a last flourish of the brush I have signed it across the corner. It is a better thing than the nasty-colored death mask which that buffoon made of my face. Enough! A fine likeness, gentlemen.

And yet … How dare he? … Oh, go to the devil, go to the devil, all go to the devil!

March 31st. Night.

Alas, my tale degenerates into a diary. There is nothing to be done, though; for I have grown so used to writing, that now I am unable to desist. A diary, I admit, is the lowest form of literature. Connoisseurs will appreciate that lovely, self-conscious, falsely significant “Night” (meaning readers to imagine the sleepless variety of literary persons, so pale, so attractive). But as a matter of fact it
is
night at present.

The hamlet where I languish lies in the cradle of a dale, between tall close mountains. I have rented a large barnlike room in the house of a dusky old woman who has a grocer’s shop below. The village consists of a single street. I might dwell at length on the charms of the spot, describing for instance the clouds that squeeze in and crawl through the house, using one set of windows, and then crawl out, using the opposite one—but it is a dull business describing such things. What amuses me is that I am the only tourist here; a foreigner to boot, and as folks have somehow managed to sniff out (oh, well, I suppose I told my landlady myself) that I came all the way from Germany, the curiosity I excite is unusual. Not since a film company came here a couple of seasons ago to take pictures of their starlet in
Les Contrebandiers
has there been such excitement. Surely, I ought to hide myself, instead of which I get into the most conspicuous place; for it would be hard to find a brighter spotlight if that was the object. But I am dead-tired; the quicker it all ends, the better.

Today, most aptly, I made the acquaintance of the local gendarme—a perfectly farcical figure! Fancy a plumpish pink-faced individual, knock-kneed, wearing a black mustache.
I was sitting at the end of a street on a bench, and all around me villagers were being busy; or better say: were pretending to be busy; in reality they kept observing me with fierce inquisitiveness and no matter in what posture they happened to be—using every path of vision, across the shoulder, via the armpit, or from under the knee; I saw them at it quite clearly. The gendarme approached me with some diffidence; mentioned the rainy weather; passed on to politics and then to the arts. He even pointed out to me a scaffold of sorts painted yellow which was all that remained of the scene where one of the smugglers almost got hanged. He reminded me in some way of the late lamented Felix: that judicious note, that mother wit of the self-made man. I asked him when the last arrest had been effected in the place. He thought a bit and replied that it had been six years ago, when they took a Spaniard who had been pretty free with his knife during a brawl and then fled to the mountains. Anon my interlocutor found it necessary to inform me that in those mountains there existed bears which had been brought thither by man, to get rid of the indigenous wolves, which struck me as very comic. But
he
did not laugh; he stood there, with his right hand dejectedly twirling the left point of his mustache and proceeded to discuss modern education: “Now take me for example,” he said. “I know geography, arithmetic, the science of war; I write a beautiful hand.…” “And do you, perchance,” I asked, “play the fiddle?” Sadly he shook his head.

At present, shivering in my icy room; cursing the barking dogs; expecting every minute to hear the guillotinette of the mousetrap in the corner crash down and behead an anonymous mouse; mechanically sipping the verbena infusion which my landlady considers it her duty to bring me, thinking
I look seedy and fearing probably that I might die before the trial; at present, I say, I am sitting here and writing on this ruled paper—no other obtainable in the village—and then meditating, and then again glancing askance at the mousetrap. There is, thank God, no mirror in the room, no more than there is the God I am thanking. All is dark, all is dreadful, and I do not see any special reason for my lingering in the dark, vainly invented world. Not that I contemplate killing myself: it would be uneconomical—as we find in almost every country a person paid by the state to help a man lethally. And then the hollow hum of blank eternity. But the most remarkable thing, perhaps, is that there is a chance of it not ending yet, i.e., of their not executing me, but sentencing me to a spell of hard labor; in which case it may happen that in five years or so with the aid of some timely amnesty, I shall return to Berlin and manufacture chocolate all over again. I do not know why—but it sounds exceedingly funny.

Let us suppose, I kill an ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a particularly clever ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a new ape—a hairless, speaking species. Nobody touches me. By ascending these subtle steps circumspectly, I may climb up to Leibnitz or Shakespeare and kill them, and nobody will touch me, as it is impossible to say where the border was crossed, beyond which the sophist gets into trouble.

The dogs are barking. I am cold. That mortal inextricable pain … Pointed with his stick. Stick. What words can be twisted out of “stick”? Sick, tick, kit, it, is, ski, skit, sit. Abominably cold. Dogs barking: one of them begins and then all the others join in. It is raining. The electric lights here are wan, yellow. What on earth have I done?

April 1st.

The danger of my tale deteriorating into a lame diary is fortunately dispelled. Just now my farcical gendarme has been here: businesslike, wearing his saber; without looking into my eyes he politely asked to see my papers. I answered that it was all right, I would be dropping in one of these days, for police formalities, but that, at the moment, I did not care to get out of my bed. He insisted, was most civil, excused himself … had to insist. I got out of bed and gave him my passport. As he was leaving, he turned in the doorway and (always in the same polite voice) asked me to remain indoors. You don’t say so!

I have crept up to the window and cautiously drawn the curtain aside. The street is full of people who stand there and gape; a hundred heads, I should say, gaping at my window. A dusty car with a policeman in it is camouflaged by the shade of the plane tree under which it discreetly waits. Through the crowd my gendarme edges his way. Better not look.

Maybe it is all mock existence, an evil dream; and presently I shall wake up somewhere; on a patch of grass near Prague. A good thing, at least, that they brought me to bay so speedily.

I have peeped again. Standing and staring. There are hundreds of them—men in blue, women in black, butcher boys, flower girls, a priest, two nuns, soldiers, carpenters, glaziers, postmen, clerks, shopkeepers … But absolute quiet; only the swish of their breathing. How about opening the window and making a little speech.…

“Frenchmen! This is a rehearsal. Hold those policemen. A famous film actor will presently come running out of this house. He is an arch-criminal but he must escape. You are asked to prevent them from grabbing him. This is part of the plot. French crowd! I want you to make a free passage for him from door to car. Remove its driver! Start the motor! Hold those policemen, knock them down, sit on them—we pay them for it. This is a German company, so excuse my French.
Les preneurs de vues
, my technicians and armed advisers are already among you.
Attention!
I want a clean getaway. That’s all. Thank you. I’m coming out now.”

BOOKS BY
V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV

ADA, OR ARDOR

Ada, or Ardor
tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0

BEND SINISTER

While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay,
Bend Sinister
is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication,
Despair
is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1

THE ENCHANTER

The Enchanter
is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel,
Lolita
. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3

THE EYE

The Eye
is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1

THE GIFT

The Gift
is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5

GLORY

Glory
is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

Invitation to a Beheading
embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE

Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0

LOLITA

Lolita
, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!

Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.