Look at the Harlequins! (24 page)

“With the beard?”

“Oh, it does not change you one droplet. It’s like wigs or green spectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt of becoming a female clown, ‘Madam Byron,’ or ‘Trek Trek.’ But tell me, Vadim Vadimovich—I mean Gospodin Long—haven’t they found you out? Don’t they intend to make much of you? After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?”

I detached myself from the bench—with some scraps of
L’Humanité
attempting to follow me—and said, yes, I had better be going before the pride outstripped the prudence. I kissed her hand whereupon she remarked that she had seen it done only in a movie called
War and Peace
. I also begged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes to be used for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for her trip to Sochi. “And he also took my whole set of safety pins,” she murmured with her all-beautifying smile.

I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet, leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken but still brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridor of the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch the earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sitting next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet wrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking Bloody Marshas,
her
joke—not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It was delightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Havemeyer (her rather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist’s offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin’s room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten something called “tabaka chicken”; and that I had left that beautiful,
beautiful
city without seeing a single ballet or variety show. “I happen
to be,” I explained, “a triple agent and you know how it is—” “Oh!” she exclaimed, with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler angle. “Oh! But that’s vurry glamorous!”

I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of her leg, ankle 8½ inches, calf 12½, creamy thigh 19½; and Louise was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes.

I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from the American edition of
A Kingdom by the Sea
. I had not seen it yet—and preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book’s art, the blurb on the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual plot of my
Kingdom
.

I pocketed it upon noticing that my long-lost fellow traveler, goat-bearded and black-hatted, as I knew him, had come up from the lavatory or the bar: Would he follow me to New York or was it to be our last meeting? Last, last. He had given himself away: The moment he came near, the moment his mouth opened in the tense-lower-lip shape that discharges, with a cheerless up-and-down shake of the head, the exclamation “
Ekh!
,” I knew not only that he was as Russian as I, but that the ancient acquaintance whom he resembled so strikingly was the father of a young poet, Oleg Orlov, whom I had met in Paris, in the Nineteen-Twenties. Oleg wrote “poems in prose” (long after Turgenev), absolutely worthless stuff, which his father, a half-demented widower, would try to “place,” pestering with his son’s worthless wares the dozen or so periodicals of the emigration. He could be seen in the waiting room miserably fawning on a harassed and curt secretary, or attempting to waylay an assistant editor between
office and toilet, or writing in stoic misery, at a corner of a crowded table, a special letter pleading the cause of some horrible little poem that had been already rejected. He died in the same Home for the Aged where Annette’s mother had spent her last years. Oleg, in the meantime, had joined the small number of
littérateurs
who decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for the rosy mess of Soviet pottage. His budtime had kept its promise. The best he had achieved during the last forty or fifty years was a medley of publicity pieces, commercial translations, vicious denunciations, and—in the domain of the arts—a prodigious resemblance to the physical aspect, voice, mannerisms, and obsequious impudence of his father.

“
Ekh!
” he exclaimed, “
Ekh
, Vadim Vadimovich
dorogoy
(dear), aren’t you ashamed of deceiving our great warm-hearted country, our benevolent, credulous government, our overworked Intourist staff, in this nasty infantile manner! A Russian writer! Snooping! Incognito! By the way, I am Oleg Igorevich Orlov, we met in Paris when we were young.”

“What do you want,
merzavetz
(you scoundrel)?” I coldly inquired as he plopped into the chair on my left.

He raised both hands in the “see-I’m-unarmed” gesture: “Nothing, nothing. Except to ruffle (
potormoshit
’) your conscience. Two courses presented themselves. We had to choose. Fyodor Mihaylovich [?] himself had to choose. Either to welcome you
po amerikanski
(the American way) with reporters, interviews; photographers, girls, garlands, and, naturally, Fyodor Mihaylovich himself [President of the Union of Writers? Head of the ‘Big House’?]; or else to ignore you—and that’s what we did. By the way: forged passports may be fun in detective stories, but our people are just not interested in passports. Aren’t you sorry now?”

I made as if to move to another seat, but he made as if
to accompany me there. So I stayed where I was, and feverishly grabbed something to read—that book in my coat pocket.

“
Et ce n’est pas tout!
” he went on. “Instead of writing for us, your compatriots, you, a Russian writer of genius, betray them by concocting, for your paymasters,
this
(pointing with a dramatically quivering index at
A Kingdom by the Sea
in my hands), this obscene novelette about little Lola or Lotte, whom some Austrian Jew or reformed pederast rapes after murdering her mother—no, excuse me—
marrying
mama first before murdering her—we like to legalize everything in the West, don’t we, Vadim Vadimovich?”

Still restraining myself, though aware of the uncontrollable cloud of black fury growing within my brain, I said: “You are mistaken. You are a somber imbecile. The novel I wrote, the novel I’m holding now, is
A Kingdom by the Sea
. You are talking of some other book altogether.”

“
Vraiment?
And maybe you visited Leningrad merely to chat with a lady in pink under the lilacs? Because, you know, you and your friends are phenomenally naïve. The reason Mister (it rhymed with ‘Easter’ in his foul serpent-mouth) Vetrov was permitted to leave a certain labor camp in Vadim—odd coincidence—so he might fetch his wife, is that he has been cured now of his mystical mania—cured by such nutcrackers, such shrinkers as are absolutely unknown in the philosophy of your Western
sharlatany
. Oh yes, precious (
dragotsennyy
) Vadim Vadimovich—”

The swing I dealt old Oleg with the back of my left fist was of quite presentable power, especially if we remember—and I remembered it as I swung—that our combined ages made 140.

There ensued a pause while I struggled back to my feet (unaccustomed momentum had somehow caused me to fall from my seat).

“
Nu, doli v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?
” he muttered
(Well, you’ve given me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?). Blood blotched the handkerchief he applied to his fat muzhikian nose.

“
Nu, dali
,” he repeated and presently wandered away.

I looked at my knuckles. They were red but intact. I listened to my wristwatch. It ticked like mad.

Speaking of philosophy, I recalled when starting to readjust myself, very temporarily, to the corners and crannies of Quirn, that somewhere in my office I kept a bundle of notes (on the Substance of Space), prepared formerly toward an account of my young years and nightmares (the work now known as
Ardis
). I also needed to sort out and remove from my office, or ruthlessly destroy, a mass of miscellanea which had accumulated ever since I began teaching.

That afternoon—a sunny and windy September afternoon—I had decided, with the unaccountable suddenness of genuine inspiration, that 1969–1970 would be my last term at Quirn University. I had, in fact, interrupted my siesta that day to request an immediate interview with the Dean. I thought his secretary sounded a little grumpy on the phone; true, I declined to explain anything beforehand, beyond confiding to her, in an informal bantering manner, that the numeral “7” always reminded me of the flag an explorer sticks in the cranium of the North Pole.

After setting out on foot and reaching the seventh poplar I realized that there might be quite a load of papers to bring from my office, so I went back for my car, and
then had difficulty in finding a place to park near the library where I intended to return a number of books which were months, if not years, overdue. In result, I was a little late for my appointment with the Dean, a new man and not my best reader. He consulted, rather demonstratively, the clock and muttered he had a “conference” in a few minutes at some other place, probably invented.

I was amused rather than surprised by the vulgar joy he did not trouble to conceal at the news of my resignation. He hardly heard the reasons which common courtesy impelled me to give (frequent headaches, boredom, the efficiency of modern recording, the comfortable income my recent novel supplied, and so forth). His whole manner changed—to use a cliché he deserves. He paced to and fro, positively beaming. He grasped my hand in a burst of brutal effusion. Certain fastidious blue-blooded animals prefer surrendering a limb to the predator rather than suffer ignoble contact. I left the Dean encumbered with a marble arm that he kept carrying in his prowlings like a trayed trophy, not knowing where to put it down.

So off to my office I stalked, a happy amputee, more than ever eager to clean up drawers and shelves. I began, however, by dashing off a note to the President of the University, another new man, informing him with a touch of French
malice
, rather than English “malice,” that my entire set of one hundred lectures on European Masterpieces was about to be sold to a generous publisher who offered me an advance of half-a-million bucks (a salubrious exaggeration), thus making transmissions of my course no longer available to students, best regards, sorry not to have met you personally.

In the name of moral hygiene I had got rid long ago of my Bechstein desk. Its considerably smaller substitute contained note paper, scratch paper, office envelopes, photo-stats of my lectures, a copy of
Dr. Olga Repnin
(hardback) which I had intended for a colleague (but had
spoiled by misspelling his name), and a pair of warm gloves belonging to my assistant (and successor) Exkul. Also three boxfuls of paper clips and a half-empty flask of whisky. From the shelves, I swept into the wastebasket, or onto the floor in its vicinity, heaps of circulars, separata, a displaced ecologist’s paper on the ravages committed by a bird of some sort, the
Ozimaya Sovka
(“Lesser Winter-Crop Owl”?), and the tidily bound page proofs (mine always come in the guise of long, horribly slippery and unwieldy snakes) of picaresque trash, full of cricks and punts, imposed on me by proud publishers hoping for a rave from the lucky bastard. A mess of business correspondence and my tractatule on Space I stuffed into a large worn folder. Adieu, lair of learning!

Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary memoirist. Only asses and geese think that the re-collector skips this or that bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that sort of episode here, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it is recorded!). I was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky folder under my arm—replacing my arm, as it were—burst its string and spilled its contents all over the gravel and grassy border. You were coming from the library along the same campus path, and we crouched side by side collecting the stuff. You were pained you said later (
zhalostno bylo
) to smell the liquor on my breath. On the breath of that great writer.