Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and Aunt Betty’s protégés should stop making their weekly calls.”
    “Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your right—please, close your eyes, you will see better—on your right there’s a vineyard; on your left, a churchyard—you can distinguish its long, low, very low, wall—”
    “You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the inscription
Dors, Médor
! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no doubt. It’s just before the last tree on the left side.”
    “So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter—but you stop all of a sudden: you’ve forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your album. We decide to go back to the post office.”
    “Can I open my eyes? Because I’m afraid I’m going to fall asleep.”
    “On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that ‘right’ instantly becomes ‘left,’ and you instantly see the ‘here’ as a ‘there,’ with the lamppost now on your left and dead Médor now on your right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do that?”
    “Done,” said Iris. “About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we start walking back?”
    “
You
may, I can’t! This is the point of the experiment. In actual, physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot ofone vista and leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point. But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning around and making myself see in terms of ‘right’ what I saw in terms of ‘left’ and vice versa.”
    I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.
    “First of all, we shall agree,” she said, “to cancel all such experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been trying to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle—on the lines of what does ‘right’ and ‘left’
mean
in our absence, when nobody is looking, in pure space, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space was the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don’t want you to go mad or to drive me mad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we’ll drop the whole business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with a kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes to take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come, and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just before dinner, while he is taking his bath.”
    I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. “It was not a dream,” she said. “He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about a dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home.”
    We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presently Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, hecould dance and fence beautifully on the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would