Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

snowstorm.”
    “The word you want,” said our Person, “is
congère
, feminine gender, I learned it from my mother.”
    “Then it’s
sugrob
in Russian,” said Armande and added dryly: “Only there won’t be much snow there in August.”
    Julia laughed. Julia looked happy and healthy. Julia had grown even prettier than she had been two years ago. Shall I now see her in dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long hair? How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions? Will the next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?
    “Let me order something for you,” said Armande to Percy, not making, however, the offering gesture that usually goes with that phrase.
    Percy thought he would like a cup of hot chocolate. The dreadful fascination of meeting an old flame in public! Armande had nothing to fear, naturally.
She
was in a totally different class, beyond competition. Hugh recalled R.’s famous novella
Three Tenses
.
    “There was something else we didn’t quite settle, Armande, or did we?”
    “Well, we spent two hours at it,” remarked Armande, rather grumpily—not realizing, perhaps, that she had nothing to fear. The fascination was of a totally different, purely intellectual or artistic order, as brought out so well in
Three Tenses:
a fashionable man in a night-blue tuxedo is supping on a lighted veranda with three bare-shouldered beauties, Alice, Beata, and Claire, who have never seen one another before. A. is a former love, B. is his present mistress, C. is his future wife.
    He regretted now not having coffee as Armande and Julia were having. The chocolate proved unpalatable. Youwere served a cup of hot milk. You also got, separately, a little sugar and a dainty-looking envelope of sorts. You ripped open the upper margin of the envelope. You added the beige dust it contained to the ruthlessly homogenized milk in your cup. You took a sip—and hurried to add sugar. But no sugar could improve the insipid, sad, dishonest taste.
    Armande, who had been following the various phases of his astonishment and disbelief, smiled and said:
    “Now you know what ‘hot chocolate’ has come to in Switzerland. My mother,” she continued, turning to Julia (who with the revelatory
sans-gêne
of the Past Tense, though actually she prided herself on her reticence, had lunged with her little spoon toward Hugh’s cup and collected a sample), “my mother actually broke into tears when she was first served this stuff, because she remembered so tenderly the chocolate of her chocolate childhood.”
    “Pretty beastly,” agreed Julia, licking her plump pale lips, “but still I prefer it to our American fudge.”
    “That’s because you are the most unpatriotic creature in the world,” said Armande.
    The charm of the Past Tense lay in its secrecy. Knowing Julia, he was quite sure she would not have told a chance friend about their affair—one sip among dozens of swallows. Thus, at this precious and brittle instant, Julia and he (
alias
Alice and the narrator) formed a pact of the past, an impalpable pact directed against reality as represented by the voluble street corner, with its swish-passing automobiles, and trees, and strangers. The B. of the trio was Busy Witt, while the main stranger—and this touched off another thrill—was his sweetheart of the morrow, Armande, and Armande was as little aware of the future (which the author, of course, knew in every detail) as she was of the past that Hugh now retasted with his browndustedmilk. Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very
good
Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of “Fascination” (a waltz) by the café’s loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable