Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page B

and seen the light and come back to describe the newly discovered sensation to her still blocked but rapt sisters, a ringing note of revivalism pleasingly coloured the proceedings ('Well, girls, when George last night -') And this was not all. Dr Eric Wind hoped to work out a technique that would allow bringing all those husbands and wives together in a joint group. Incidentally, it was deadening to hear him and Liza smacking their lips over the word 'group'. In a long letter to distressed Pnin, Professor Chateau affirmed that Dr Wind even called Siamese twins 'a group'. And indeed progressive, idealistic Wind dreamed of a happy world consisting of Siamese centuplets, anatomically conjoined communities, whole nations built around a communicating liver. 'It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of Communism - all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?'

6
    'Look,' said Joan on Saturday morning to her husband, 'I have decided to tell Timofey they will have the house to themselves today from two to five. We must give those pathetic creatures every possible chance. There are things I can do in town, and you will be dropped at the library.'
    'It so happens,' answered Laurence, 'that I have not the least intention to be dropped or otherwise moved anywhere today. Besides, it is highly improbable they will need eight rooms for their reunion.'
    Pnin put on his new brown suit (paid for by the Cremona lecture) and, after a hurried lunch at The Egg and We, walked through the snow-patched park to the Waindell bus station, arriving there almost an hour too early. He did not bother to puzzle out why exactly Liza had felt the urgent need to see him on her way back from visiting St Bartholomew's, the preparatory school near Boston that her son would go to next fall: all he knew was that a flood of happiness foamed and rose behind the invisible barrier that was to burst open any moment now. He met five buses, and in each of them clearly made out Liza waving to him through a window as she and the other passengers started to file out, and then one bus after another was drained and she had not turned up. Suddenly he heard her sonorous voice ('Timofey, zdrastvuy!') behind him, and, wheeling around, saw her emerge from the only Greyhound he had decided would not bring her. What change could our friend discern in her? What change could there be, good God! There she was. She always felt hot and buoyant, no matter the cold, and now her sealskin coat was wide open on her frilled blouse as she hugged Pnin's head and he felt the grapefruit fragrance of her neck, and kept muttering: 'Nu, nu, vot i horosho, nu vot' - mere verbal heart props - and she cried out: 'Oh, he has splendid new teeth!' He helped her into a taxi, her bright diaphanous scarf caught on something, and Pnin slipped on the pavement, and the taximan said 'Easy,' and took her bag from him, and everything had happened before, in this exact sequence.
    It was, she told him as they drove up Park Street, a school in the English tradition. No, she did not want to eat anything, she had had a big lunch at Albany. It was a 'very fancy' school - she said this in English - the boys played a kind of indoor tennis with their hands, between walls, and there would be in his form a - (she produced with false nonchalance a well-known American name which meant nothing to Pnin because it was not that of a poet or a president). 'By the way,' interrupted Pnin, ducking and pointing, 'you can just see a corner of the campus from here.' All this was due ('Yes, I see, vizhu, vizhu, kampus kak kampus: The usual kind of thing'), all this, including a scholarship, was due to the influence of Dr Maywood ('You know, Timofey, some day you should write him a word, just a little sign of courtesy'). The Principal, a clergyman, had shown her the trophies Bernard had won there as a boy.