Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page A

uncomfortable mushroom seat, but Wind put five long sensitive fingers on his sleeve.
    'Lasse mich, lasse mich,' wailed Pnin, trying to beat off the limp fawning hand.
    'Please!' said Dr Wind. 'Be just. The prisoner has always the last word; it is his right. Even the Nazis admit it. And first of all - I want you to allow me to pay at least one-half of the lady's passage.'
    'Ach nein, nein, nein,' said Pnin. 'Let us finish this nightmare conversation (diese koschmarische Sprache).'
    'As you like,' said Dr Wind, and proceeded to impress upon pinned Pnin the following points: That it had all been Liza's idea - 'simplifying matters, you know, for the sake of our child' (the 'our' sounded tripersonal); that Liza should be treated as a very sick woman (pregnancy being really the sublimation of a death wish); that he (Dr Wind) would marry her in America - 'where I am also going,' Dr Wind added for clarity; and that he (Dr Wind) should at least be permitted to pay for the beer. From then on to the end of the voyage that had turned from green and silver to a uniform grey, Pnin busied himself overtly with his English-language manuals, and although immutably meek with Liza, tried to see her as little as he could without awakening her suspicions. Every now and then Dr Wind would appear from nowhere and make from afar signs of recognition and reassurance. And at last, when the great statue arose from the morning haze where, ready to be ignited by the sun, pale, spellbound buildings stood like those mysterious rectangles of unequal height that you see in bar graph representations of compared percentages (natural resources, the frequency of mirages in different deserts), Dr Wind resolutely walked up to the Pnins and identified himself - 'because all three of us must enter the land of liberty with pure hearts.' And after a bathetic sojourn on Ellis Island, Timofey and Liza parted.
    There were complications - but at last Wind married her. In the course of the first five years in America, Pnin glimpsed her on several occasions in New York; he and the Winds were naturalized on the same day; then, after his removal to Waindell in 1945, half a dozen years passed without any meetings or correspondence. He heard of her, however, from time to time. Recently (in December 1951) his friend Chateau had sent him an issue of a journal of psychiatry with an article written by Dr Albina Dunkelberg. Dr Eric Wind, and Dr Liza Wind on 'Group Psychotherapy Applied to Marriage Counselling'. Pnin used to be always embarrassed by Liza's 'psihooslinïe' ('psychoasinine') interests, and even now, when he ought to have been indifferent, he felt a twinge of revulsion and pity. Eric and she were working under the great Bernard Maywood, a genial giant of a man - referred to as 'The Boss' by over-adaptive Eric - at a Research Bureau attached to a Planned Parenthood centre. Encouraged by his and his wife's protector, Eric evolved the ingenious idea (possibly not his own) of sidetracking some of the more plastic and stupid clients of the Centre into a psychotherapeutic trap - a 'tension-releasing' circle on the lines of a quilting bee, where young married women in groups of eight relaxed in a comfortable room amid an atmosphere of cheerful first-name informality, with doctors at a table facing the group, and a secretary unobtrusively taking notes, and traumatic episodes floating out of everybody's childhood like corpses. At these sessions, the ladies were made to discuss among themselves with absolute frankness their problems of marital maladjustment, which entailed, of course, comparing notes on their mates, who later were interviewed, too, in a special' husband group', likewise very informal, with a great passing around of cigars and anatomic charts. Pnin skipped the actual reports and case histories - and there is no need to go here into those hilarious details. Suffice it to say that already at the third session of the female group, after this or that lady had gone home