You've Got to Read This (72 page)

"Are you guys dead?" Eva says, rousing them. "Aren't we home?"

S p r i n g i n Fialta

by V l a d i m i r N a b o k o v

Introduced by Jim Shepard

401

THE FIRST TIME I ENCOUNTERED "SPRING IN FIALTA" I NOT ONLY READ

it in one sitting, I inhabited it long after I put the book down. For the greater part of the following afternoon, I wandered around the house not quite hearing things. I later learned the story had been a favorite of Nabokov's, and I can well imagine the number of ways it pleased him: from the delight it takes in demolishing any expected lyricism in its opening gesture (After the title we read, "Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull"), to its quiet series of multiplying alter egos, down to the plus-foured Englishman whose lustful eye shifts from Nina to a "compact furry moth, which he deftly slipped into a pillbox," to the elegance and the wit with which huge expositional apparatuses are dealt away with ("quite a long time ago, around 1917 I should say, judging by certain left-wing theater rumblings backstage"). The story clearly owes to Anton Chekhov's "The Kiss" and "The Lady with the Little Dog"

some of its thematic heart: that pervasive and disorienting sense that the false part of one's life is happening openly while the real and interesting part remains hidden. But only some of its thematic heart, and the rest has a lot to do with the story's greatness.

Victor, an emigre, recounts a chance meeting in the seaside resort of.

Fialta ("a blend of the Adriatic's Fiume and the Black Sea's Yalta," biographer Brian Boyd informs us) with Nina, a woman who inexplicably kissed him on a snowy path on a Russian winter night fifteen years earlier, before they had exchanged a word. Victor, who for most of the story has hovered nearby an

"island of happiness" represented by home and family, is nonetheless a man given to slight boredom, gloomy thoughts, and stirring recollections, in the manner of one of those Chekhovian intellectuals who combines human decency with an inability in his private life to do anything useful, a man who seems to be in a kind of continuous stumble. Over the course of the story he relives his entire tenuous relationship with her. The ways in which their connection—a history consisting almost entirely of gaps—takes on a compelling force precisely parallels the ways in which a short story's few perfectly chosen trifles cohere to create the illusion of a dense, substantial, and extensive world.

Victor tells us that he can never "find the precise term" for the kind of relationship he shares with Nina; the story can be seen as the attempt to enlarge our vocabulary by that one word. Nina fits her "generous, dutiful lips" to his in their first meeting, and the nature of that generosity and dutifulness—that "sunburst of kindness" of which she seemed always capable—

is what Victor never fully comprehends; he allows her to remain a figure of fantasy, imagined in his own image. How familiar to him, he says, were her

"hesitations, second thoughts, third thoughts mirroring first ones, ephemeral
INTRODUCTION BY JIM SHEPARD " 403

worries"; how familiar, indeed. His quintessential image of her is one that encapsulates not only the transience of his own emigre existence but the nature of his emotional life: "She had always either just arrived or was about to leave." Everything in the story seems to take place in "that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished," all of it, in the manner of train traveler Nina, "slipping away with beautiful smoothness."

He goes about the business of life, ignoring his idealized love for his Nina, who remains an unstable mix of the woman he occasionally observes so acutely and the solipsized creation of his own melancholy. He announces:

"were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth." That's precisely what he does, while we watch. His story is about the relationship of memory to imagination, especially in the face of loss. We watch him cobble together only what he can remember and may have occasionally imagined: trifles.

But what trifles! That little pantless infant boy, "trying to carry three oranges at once, but continually dropping the variable third, until he fell himself'; Nina's "yellow scarf already on the move like those dogs that recognize you before their owners do"; his gazing into her train compartment as though "spying upon an utterly unsuspecting life moving in that aquarium dimness"; his registering, upon telling her that he'd hoped she'd come to his room the night they shared a chateau, both her dismay at having disappointed him and her rapid estimating glance at the receding back of her husband.

These are trifles designed to disclose the wistful helplessness of human beings: the not-so-very young man who made such a discreet mess of his life, the young woman who will never be happy.

As the story progresses, the intimations of Nina's mortality become more gently insistent, and with them the story's sadness begins to bloom and grow, a sadness that suffuses everything in the manner of Fialta's saturated sunshine. And yet the painful absurdity of the situation never recedes.

(Nabokov remarked that Chekhov wrote "sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness.") Nearly all of Victor's memories point the inexorable way to loss: consider the moment he views her surrounded by acquaintances "who stood in a circle gaping at her as idlers gape at a street row, a lost child, or the victim of an accident," all three examples heartbreakingly indicating to her final fate. And all such memories lead to the story's climactic scene, the moment when they find themselves alone "on a rough kind of terrace" with a view that brings together all the bright bits of memory strewn throughout the story: dove-colored Mount St. George, the train that brought Victor to Fialta, the cypress that first leads the way up that slope, and, of course, Nina's kiss.

"With an unbearable force" our hero relives "all that had ever been between
404 • SPRING IN FIALTA

us beginning with a similar kiss" and is finally forced to say, "Look here—

what if I love you?" And Nina glances at him, puzzled and then embarrassed.

And he, to his everlasting regret, recants: never mind, he was only joking.

She is gone forever, and he never really knew her. A standard romantic lament. His earlier apprehensions are correct: "something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper." There may have been, to quote
Lolita's
Humbert Humbert, "a garden, and a twilight, and a palace gate" behind that face he so closely observed, but he never troubled himself, never disturbed the smooth flow of his life, to find out. And if he had? "But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?"

But then something mysterious—and utterly Nabokovian—happens. The moment of greatest sadness becomes the moment when we suddenly understand something we had been seeing without understanding: a radiance that had been present throughout the story, in Fialta, in Nina, and in what both engender in Victor. There
is,
it turns out, "something in the very somnolence of [Fialta's] humid Lent that especially anoints one's soul," and that something is what Victor—and we—are left with.
"This time,"
Victor tells us,
"we
had met in warm and misty Fialta, and I could not have celebrated the occasion with greater art."
Exactly. Victor's twin poles of "truth" and "imagination" are blended here not by presence, but by absence—an irony hiding within the supposed stripping away of irony—and here again Victor's lyricism, like his whole relation to Nina, is dependent on these aspects of removal, absence, untouchability. Imagination is what he always had, not memory; imagination is what is being celebrated, and indicted. What has happened does not conform, strictly, to common sense. But as Nabokov has told us, common sense at its worst is a sense made common. What has happened leaves us with a story which, as he once said of Chekhov's work,

"will live as long as there are birchwoods and sunsets and the urge to write."

S p r i n g in Fialta

V l a d i m i r N a b o k o v

S
pring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel.

Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which have tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St. George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture post cards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of sea shells. The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in a solution of rain, is less glaucous than gray with waves too sluggish to break into foam.

It was on such a day in the early thirties that I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of Fialta's steep little streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the stand, and the coral crucifixes in a shopwindow, and the dejected poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which retained here and there a fading memory of ancient mosaic design. I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one's soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt.

I had come on the Capparabella express, which, with that reckless gusto peculiar to trains in mountainous country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible. A day or two, just as long as a breathing spell in the midst of a business trip would allow me, was all I expected to stay. I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being, always floating beside me, and even through me, I dare say, but yet keeping on the outside of me most of the time.

A pantless infant of the male sex, with a taut mud-gray little belly, jerkily stepped down from a doorstep and waddled off, bowlegged, trying to
405

406 • SPRING IN FIALTA

carry three oranges at once, but continuously dropping the variable third, until he fell himself, and then a girl of twelve or so, with a string of heavy beads around her dusky neck and wearing a skirt as long as that of a gypsy, promptly took away the whole lot with her more nimble and more numerous hands. Nearby, on the wet terrace of a cafe, a waiter was wiping the slabs of tables; a melancholy brigand hawking local lollipops, elaborate-looking things with a lunar gloss, had placed a hopelessly full basket on the cracked balustrade, over which the two were conversing. Either the drizzle had stopped or Fialta had got so used to it that she herself did not know whether she was breathing moist air or warm rain. Thumb-filling his pipe from a rubber pouch as he walked, a plus-foured Englishman of the solid exportable sort came from under an arch and entered a pharmacy, where large pale sponges in a blue vase were dying a thirsty death behind their glass. What luscious elation I felt rippling through my veins, how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutters and effluvia of that gray day saturated with a vernal essence which itself it seemed slow in perceiving! My nerves were unusually receptive after a sleepless night; I assimilated everything: the whistling of a thrush in the almond trees beyond the chapel, the peace of the crumbling houses, the pulse of the distant sea, panting in the mist, all this together with the jealous green of bottle glass bristling along the top of a wall and the fast colors of a circus advertisement featuring a feathered Indian on a rearing horse in the act of lassoing a boldly endemic zebra, while some thoroughly fooled elephants sat brooding upon their star-spangled thrones.

Presently the same Englishman overtook me. As I absorbed him along with the rest, I happened to notice the sudden side-roll of his big blue eye straining at its crimson canthus, and the way he rapidly moistened his lips—

because of the dryness of those sponges, I thought; but then I followed the direction of his glance, and saw Nina.

Every time I had met her during the fifteen years of our—well, I fail to find the precise term for our kind of relationship—she had not seemed to recognize me at once; and this time too she remained quite still for a moment, on the opposite sidewalk, half turning toward me in sympathetic incertitude mixed with curiosity, only her yellow scarf already on the move like those dogs that recognize you before their owners do—and then she uttered a cry, her hands up, all her ten fingers dancing, and in the middle of the street, with merely the frank impulsiveness of an old friendship (just as she would rapidly make the sign of the cross over me every time we parted), she kissed me thrice with more mouth than meaning, and then walked beside me, hanging on to me, adjusting her stride to mine, ham-pered by her narrow brown skirt perfunctorily slit down the side.

"Oh yes, Ferdie is here too," she replied and immediately in her turn inquired nicely after Elena.

"Must be loafing somewhere around with Segur," she went on in refer-VLADIMIR NABOKOV • 407