Vladimir Nabokov. First Love
1
In the early years of this century, a travel agency on
Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown
international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it
completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains.
Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue
upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the
compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors,
tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details.
Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or
geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of
the compartments, the beds had been made.
The then great and glamorous Nord Express (it was never
the same after World War I), consisting solely of such
international cars and running but twice a week, connected St.
Petersburg with Paris. I would have said: directly with Paris,
had passengers not been obliged to change from one train to a
superficially similar one at the Russo-German frontier
(Verzhbolovo-Eydtkuhnen), where the ample and lazy Russian
sixty-and-a-half-inch gauge was replaced by the
fifty-six-and-a-half-inch standard of Europe and coal succeeded
birch logs.
In the far end of my mind I can unravel, I think, at least
five such journeys to Paris, with the Riviera or Biarritz as
their ultimate destination. In 1909, the year I now single out,
my two small sisters had been left at home with nurses and
aunts. Wearing gloves and a traveling cap, my father sat
reading a book in the compartment he shared with our tutor. My
brother and I were separated from them by a washroom. My mother
and her maid occupied a compartment adjacent to ours. The odd
one of our party, my father''s valet, Osip (whom, a decade
later, the pedantic Bolsheviks were to shoot, because he
appropriated our bicycles instead of turning them over to the
nation), had a stranger for companion.
In April of that year, Peary had reached the North Pole.
In May, Chaliapin had sung in Paris. In June, bothered by
rumors of new and better zeppelins, the United States War
Department had told reporters of plans for an aerial navy. In
July, Bleriot had flown from Calais to Dover (with a little
additional loop when he lost his bearings). It was late August
now. The firs and marshes of northwestern Russia sped by, and
on the following day gave way to German pine barrens and
heather.
At a collapsible table, my mother and I played a card game
called durachki. Although it was still broad daylight,
our cards, a glass, and on a different plane the locks of a
suitcase were reflected in the window. Through forest and
field, and in sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages,
those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for steadily
sparkling stakes.
"Ne budet-li, tÏ ved'' ustal?" ("Haven''t you had
enough, aren''t you tired? ''") my mother would ask, and then
would be lost in thought as she slowly shuffled the cards. The
door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor
window, where the wires-- six thin black wires-- were doing
their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the
lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another;
but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation,
were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly
vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever
been, and they would have to start all over again.
When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its
pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed housefronts and
shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used
to feel a twofold excitement, which terminal stations could not
provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and
brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and
fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This
informal contact between train and city was one part of the
thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some
passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself
to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their
intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and
their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly
negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and
then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last
block of houses.
There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The
wide-windowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral
water, miterfolded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars (whose
wrappers-- Cailler, Kohler, and so forth-- enclosed nothing but
wood) would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a
consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal
progressed toward its fatal last course, one would keep
catching the car in the act of being recklessly sheathed,
lurching waiters and all, in the landscape, while the landscape
itself went through a complex system of motion, the daytime
moon stubbornly keeping abreast of one''s plate, the distant
meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on
invisible swings toward the track, a parallel rail line all at
once committing suicide by anastomosis, a bank of nictitating
grass rising, rising, rising, until the little witness of mixed
velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux
confitures de fraises.
It was at night, however, that the Compagnie
Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express
EuropÉens lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed
under my brother''s bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?),
in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and
parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows
cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork
gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the
toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of
the blue, bivalved night-light swung rhythmically. It was hard
to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth,
with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew
was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible.
I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of
identifying myself: with the engine driver. A sense of drowsy
well-being invaded my veins as soon as I had everything nicely
arranged-- the carefree passengers in their rooms enjoying the
ride I was giving them, smoking, exchanging, knowing smiles,
nodding, dozing; the waiters and cooks and train guards (whom I
had to place somewhere) carousing in the diner; and myself,
goggled and begrimed, peering out of the engine cab at the
tapering track, at the ruby or emerald point in the black
distance. And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally
different-- a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy
engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely.
A change in the speed of the train sometimes interrupted
the current of my sleep. Slow lights were stalking by; each, in
passing, investigated the same chink, and then a luminous
compass measured the shadows. Presently, the train stopped with
a long-drawn Westinghousian sigh. Something (my brother''s
spectacles, as it proved next day) fell from above. It was
marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one''s bed, with
part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously
the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide
only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper
berth.
Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a
lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench.
Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices,
somebody''s comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly
interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and
still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of
its own accord.
Next morning, wet fields with misshapen willows along the
radius of a ditch or a row of poplars afar, traversed by a
horizontal band of milky-white mist, told one that the train
was spinning through Belgium. It reached Paris at four p.m.;
and even if the stay was only an overnight one, I had always
time to purchase something-- say, a little brass Tour
Eiffel, rather roughly coated with silver paint-- before we
boarded at noon on the following day the Sud Express, which, on
its way to Madrid, dropped us around ten p.m. at the La
NÉgresse station of Biarritz, a few miles from the Spanish
frontier.
2
Biarritz still retained its quiddity in those days. Dusty
blackberry bushes and weedy terrains À vendre bordered
the road that led to our villa. The Cariton was still being
built. Some thirty-six years had to elapse before Brigadier
General Samuel McCroskey would occupy the royal suite of the
Hotel du Palais, which stands ...
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