The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

inside. I turned the handle, but the door was locked. “Who’s there?” came Pal Palych’s flustered voice.
    I shouted, “Come on, let me in!” The mattress clinked again, and there was a slapping of unshod feet. “What do you lock yourself in for, Pal Palych?” I noticed right away that his eyes were red.
    “Come in, come in.… Glad to see you. You see, I was asleep. Come on in.”
    “We forgot a cigarette holder here,” I said, trying not to look at him.
    We finally found the green-enameled tube under the armchair. I stuck it in my pocket. Pal Palych was trumpeting into his handkerchief.
    “She’s a wonderful person,” he said inopportunely, sitting down heavily on the bed. He sighed and looked askance. “There’s something about a Russian woman, a certain—” He got all wrinkled up and rubbed his brow. “A certain”—he emitted a gentle grunt—“spirit of self-sacrifice. There is nothing more sublime in the world. That extraordinarily subtle, extraordinarily sublime spirit of self-sacrifice.” He joined his hands behind his head and broke into a lyrical smile.
    “Extraordinarily …” He fell silent, then asked, already with a different tone, one that he often used to make me laugh, “And what else do you have to tell me, my friend?” I felt like giving him a hug, saying something full of warmth, something he needed. “You ought to go for a walk, Pal Palych. Why mope in a stuffy room?”
    He gave a dismissive wave. “I’ve seen all there is to see. You do nothing b-but get all hot out there.…” He wiped his puffy eyes and his mustache with a downward motion of his hand. “Maybe tonight I’ll go do some fishing.” The pimplelike mole on his wrinkled eyelid twitched.
    One ought to have asked him, “Dear Pal Palych, why were you lying down just now with your face buried in the pillow? Is it just hay fever, or some major grief? Have you ever loved a woman? And why cry on a day like this, with this nice sunshine and the puddles outside? …”
    “Well, I have to run, Pal Palych,” I said, glancing at the abandoned glasses, the typographically re-created Tolstoy, and the boots with earlike loops under the table.
    Two flies settled on the red floor. One climbed on top of the other. They buzzed and flew apart.
    “No hard feelings,” Pal Palych said with a slow exhalation. He shook his head. “I’ll grin and bear it—go, don’t let me keep you.”
    I was running again along the path, next to the alder bushes. I felt that I had bathed in another’s grief, that I was radiant with his tears. The feeling was a happy one, which I have since experienced only rarely: at the sight of a bowed tree, a pierced glove, a horse’s eye. It was happy because it had a harmonious flow. It was happy as any movement or radiance is happy. I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew—secretly—the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul’s musical ear knew and comprehended everything.
    You met me on the paved section of the garden, by the veranda steps, and your first words were, “My husband called from town while I wasgone. He’s coming on the ten o’clock. Something must have happened. Maybe he’s being transferred.”
    A wagtail, like a blue-gray wind, quickstepped across the sand. A pause, two or three steps, another pause, more steps. The wagtail, the cigarette holder in my hand, your words, the spots of sunlight on your dress … It could not have been otherwise.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” you said, knitting your eyebrows. “You’re thinking someone will tell him and so forth. But it makes no difference.… You know what