Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page B

he again accompanied them next morning. He begged them to let him set his own pace, without waiting for him anywhere, and he would have reached the cableway had he not lost his bearings and ended up in a brambly burn at the end of a logging road. Another attempt a day or two later was more successful. He almost reached timberline—but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.
    Another time he volunteered to carry after her a pair of new skis she had just acquired—weird-looking, reptile-green things made of metal and fiberglass. Their elaborate bindings looked like first cousins of orthopedic devices meant to help a cripple to walk. He was allowed to shoulder those precious skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon grew as heavy as great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered in Armande’s wake like a clown helping to change properties in a circus arena. His load was snatched from him as soon as he sat down for a rest. He was offered a paper bag (four small oranges) in exchange but he pushed it away without looking.
    Our Person was obstinate and monstrously in love. A fairy-tale element seemed to imbue with its Gothic rose water all attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon. Next week he made it and thereafter established himself as less of a nuisance.

15
    As he sat sipping rum on the sun terrace of the Café du Glacier below Drakonita Hut and rather smugly contemplated, with the exhilaration of liquor in the mountain air, the skiing area (such a magic sight after so much water and matted grass!); as he took in the glaze of the upper runs, the blue herringbones lower down, the varicolored little figures outlined by the brush of chance against the brilliant white as if by a Flemish master’s hand, Hugh told himself that this might make an admirable jacket design for
Christies and Other Lassies
, a great skier’s autobiography (thoroughly revised and enriched by a number of hands in the office), the typescript of which he had recently copy-edited, querying, as he now recalled, such terms as
“godilles”
and
“wedeln”
(rom?). It was fun to peer over one’s third drink at the painted little people skimming along, losing a ski here, a pole there, or victoriously veering in a spray of silver powder. Hugh Person, now shifting to kirsch, wondered if he could force himself to follow her advice (“such a nice big slouchy sporty-looking Yank and can’t ski!”) and identify himself with this or that chap charging straight down in a stylish crouch, or else be doomed to repeat for ever and ever the after-fallpause of a bulky novice asprawl on his back in hopeless, good-humored repose.
    He never could pinpoint, with his dazzled and watery eyes, Armande’s silhouette among the skiers. Once, however, he was sure he had caught her, floating and flashing, red-anoraked, bare-headed, agonizingly graceful, there, there, and now there, jumping a bump, shooting down nearer and nearer, going into a tuck—and abruptly changing into a goggled stranger.
    Presently she appeared from another side of the terrace, in glossy green nylon, carrying her skis, but with her formidable boots still on. He had spent enough time studying skiwear in Swiss shops to know that shoe leather had been replaced by plastic, and laces by rigid clips. “You look like the first girl on the moon,” he said, indicating her boots, and if they had not been especially close fitting she would have wiggled her toes inside as a woman does when her footwear happens to be discussed in flattering terms (smiling toes taking over the making of mouths).
    “Listen,” she said as she considered her Mondstein Sexy (their incredible trade name), “I’ll leave my skis here, and change into walking shoes and return to Witt with you
à deux
. I’ve quarreled with Jacques, and he has left with his dear friends.