Vladimir Nabokov. "That in Aleppo Once
Dear V.-- Among other things, this is to tell you that at
last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have
led. One of the first persons I saw was our good old Gleb
Alexandrovich Gekko gloomily crossing Columbus Avenue in quest
of the petit cafe du coin which none of us three will
ever visit again. He seemed to think that somehow or other you
were betraying our national literature, and he gave me your
address with a deprecatory shake of his gray head, as if you
did not deserve the treat of hearing from me.
I have a story for you. Which reminds me-- I mean putting
it like this reminds me-- of the days when we wrote our first
udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a
lighted window, cried out to us: "I''m a rhyme!" Yes, this is a
most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme,
umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a
meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded
newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with
abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept
embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like
that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.
I married, let me see, about a month after you left France
and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris.
Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am
positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name
from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the
name of an illusion. Therefore, I am able to speak of her with
as much detachment as I would of a character in a story (one of
your stories, to be precise).
It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for
I had met her several times before without experiencing any
special emotions; but one night, as I was seeing her home,
something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and
lightly kiss her on the hair-- and of course we all know of
that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a
small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the
soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic
soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his
life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being. And
really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that
the visible firmament, especially at night (above our
blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its boulevard
Exelmans and the ceaseless alpine gurgle of desolate latrines),
is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast
silent explosion.
But I cannot discern her. She remains as nebulous as my
best poem-- the one you made such gruesome fun of in the
LiteratmnÐe Zapiski. When I want to imagine her, I have
to cling mentally to a tiny brown birthmark on her downy
forearm, as one concentrates upon a punctuation mark in an
illegible sentence. Perhaps, had she used a greater amount of
make-up or used it more constantly, I might have visualized her
face today, or at least the delicate transverse furrows of dry,
hot rouged lips; but I fail, I fail-- although I still feel
their elusive touch now and then in the blindman''s buff of my
senses, in that sobbing sort of dream when she and I clumsily
clutch at each other through a heartbreaking mist and I cannot
see the color of her eyes for the blank luster of brimming
tears drowning their irises.
She was much younger than I-- not as much younger as was
Nathalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long earrings in
relation to swarthy Pushkin; but still there was a sufficient
margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds
pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius (down to
the jealousy, down to the filth, down to the stab of seeing her
almond-shaped eyes turn to her blond Cassio behind her
peacock-feathered fan) even if one cannot imitate his verse.
She liked mine though, and would scarcely have yawned as the
other was wont to do every time her husband''s poem happened to
exceed the length of a sonnet. If she has remained a phantom to
me, I may have been one to her: I suppose she had been solely
attracted by the obscurity of my poetry; then tore a hole
through its veil and saw a stranger''s unlovable face.
As you know, I had been for some time planning to follow
the example of your fortunate flight. She described to me an
uncle of hers who lived, she said, in New York: he had taught
riding at a southern college and had wound up by marrying a
wealthy American woman; they had a little daughter born deaf.
She said she had lost their address long ago, but a few days
later it miraculously turned up, and we wrote a dramatic letter
to which we never received any reply. This did not much matter,
as I had already obtained a sound affidavit from Professor
Lornchenko of Chicago; but little else had been done in the way
of getting the necessary papers, when the invasion began,
whereas I foresaw that if we stayed on in Paris some helpful
compatriot of mine would sooner or later point out to the
interested party sundry passages in one of my books where I
argued that, with all her many black sins, Germany was still
bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the
world.
So we started upon our disastrous honeymoon. Crushed and
jolted amid the apocalyptic exodus, waiting for unscheduled
trains that were bound for unknown destinations, walking
through the stale stage setting of abstract towns, living in a
permanent twilight of physical exhaustion, we fled; and the
farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us
on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his
assortment of variously propelled junk-- something of which he
was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a
timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still
keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum
of Central Park.
Oh, she bore it gamely enough-- with a kind of dazed
cheerfulness. Once, however, quite suddenly she started to sob
in a sympathetic railway carriage. "The dog," she said, "the
dog we left. I cannot forget the poor dog."'' The honesty other
grief shocked me, as we had never had any dog. "I know, ''" she
said, "but I tried to imagine we had actually bought that
setter. And just think, he would be now whining behind a locked
door." There had never been any talk of buying a setter.
I should also not like to forget a certain stretch of
highroad and the sight of a family of refugees (two women, a
child) whose old father, or grandfather, had died on the way.
The sky was a chaos of black and flesh-colored clouds with an
ugly sunburst beyond a hooded hill, and the dead man was lying
on his back under a dusty plane tree. With a stick and their
hands the women had tried to dig a roadside grave, but the soil
was too hard; they had given it up and were sitting side by
side, among the anÊmie poppies, a little apart from the corpse
and its upturned beard. But the little boy was still scratching
and scraping and tugging until he tumbled a flat stone and
forgot the object of his solemn exertions as he crouched on his
haunches, his thin, eloquent neck showing all its vertebrae to
the headsman, and watched with surprise and delight thousands
of minute brown ants seething, zigzagging, dispersing, heading
for places of safety in the Gard, and the Aude, and the Drome,
and the Var, and the Basses-Pyrenees-- we two paused only in
Pau.
Spain proved too difficult and we decided to move on to
Nice. At a place called Faugeres (a ten-minute stop) I squeezed
out of the train to buy some food. When a couple of minutes
later I came back, the train was gone, and the muddled old man
responsible for the atrocious void that faced me (coal dust
glittering in the heat between naked indifferent rails, and a
lone piece of orange peel) brutally told me that, anyway, I had
had no right to get out.
In a better world I could have had my wife located and
told what to do (I had both tickets and most of the money); as
it was, my nightmare struggle with the telephone proved futile,
so I dismissed the whole series of diminutive voices ...
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