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

the black ripples. Laughing aloud, I pushed away from the handrail.
    I passed the isbas in one soundless sweep along the firmly packed path. Mooing sounds floated past through the lusterless air; some skittles flew up with a clatter. Then, farther along, on the highway, in the vastness of the sunset, amid the faintly vaporous fields, there was silence.
    *The sharp-eyed bilingual reader familiar with the original Russian may note the substitution of “hairless” for “irresolute.” The two words resemble each other in Russian, and “irresolute” was almost certainly the result of a copyist’s slip.—D.N.

WINGSTROKE
1

    W HEN the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward. The scalding snow goes up your sleeves, and it is very hard to get back on your feet. Kern, who had not skied for a long time, rapidly worked up a sweat. Feeling slightly dizzy, he yanked off the woolen cap that had been tickling his ears, and brushed the moist sparks from his eyelashes.
    All was merriment and azure in front of the six-story hotel. The trees stood disembodied in the radiance. Countless ski tracks flowed like shadowy hair down the shoulders of the snowy hills. And all around, a gigantic whiteness rushed heavenward and sparkled, unfettered, in the sky.
    Kern’s skis creaked as he made his way up the slope. Noticing his broad shoulders, his equine profile, and the robust gloss on his cheekbones, the English girl he had met yesterday, the third day since his arrival, had taken him for a compatriot. Isabel, Airborne Isabel, as she was dubbed by a crowd of sleek and swarthy young men of the Argentine type, who scurried everywhere in her wake: to the hotel ballroom, up the padded stairs, along the snowy slopes in a play of sparkling dust. Her mien was airy and impetuous, her mouth so red it seemed the Creator had scooped up some torrid carmine and slapped a handful on the nether part of her face. Laughter flitted in her down-flecked eyes. A Spanish comb stood erect like a wing in the steep wave of her black, satin-sheeny hair. This was how Kern had seen her yesterday, when the slightly hollow din of the gong summoned her to dinner from Room 35. And the fact that they were neighbors, and that the number of her room was that of his years, and that she was seated across from him at the long table d’hôte, tall, vivacious, in a low-cut black dress, with a band of black silk on her bare neck—all this seemedso significant to Kern that it made a rift in the dull melancholy that had already oppressed him for half a year.
    It was Isabel who spoke first, and that did not surprise him. In this huge hotel that blazed, isolated, in a cleft between the mountains, life pulsed tipsy and lighthearted after the dead War years. Besides, to her, to Isabel, nothing was forbidden—not the sidelong flutter of eyelashes, not the melody of laughter in her voice as she said, handing Kern the ashtray, “I think you and I are the only English here,” and added, inclining tableward a translucent shoulder restrained by a black ribbonlike strap, “Not counting, of course, a half-dozen little old ladies, and that character over there with the turned-around collar.”
    Kern replied, “You’re mistaken. I have no homeland. It’s true I spent many years in London. Besides—”
    The next morning, after a half-year of indifference, he suddenly felt the pleasure of entering the deafening cone of an ice-cold shower. At nine, after a substantial and sensible breakfast, he crunched off on his skis across the reddish sand scattered on the naked glare of the path before the hotel veranda. When he had mounted the snowy slope, herringbone-style as befits a skier, there, amid checkered knickers and flushed faces, was Isabel.
    She greeted him English fashion—with but the flourish of a smile. Her skis were iridescent with olive-gold. Snow clung to the intricate straps that held her feet. There was an unfeminine strength about her feet and legs, shapely in