JOYCE CAROL OATES

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

7899-7977

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to rich

and cultured parents who spoke Russian, French,

and English—”a typical trilingual upbringing,” as

he would later recall. At the time of the Commu-

nist revolution, he fled with his family into West-

ern Europe. He attended Cambridge University in

England and took a degree in modern languages

there in 1923. Thereafter, he spent years in Berlin

and Paris, supporting himself by coaching tennis

and making up chess problems, all the while writ-

ing novels in Russian and English. Living in France

when it was overrun by the Nazis, he escaped with

his family to the United States, where he became a

citizen and—by a remarkable imaginative trans-

formation—an American writer, beginning with The Real Life ofSebastian Knight

(1941). He taught Russian and comparative literature at Cornell University

until Lolita (a best seller in 1955) and subsequent novels gave him enough

money to allow him a full-time commitment to writing and his other eminent

career: Nabokov was also a world-renowned lepidopterist, a scientist of moths

and butterflies. He lived the last twenty years of his life in Montreux, Switzer-

land. His complete works in all languages would run to thirty or forty vol-

umes, exemplifying the complexity of his life and his interests in language

and experience. In most of his fiction, memories of a dissolving past mingle

with an ironic sense of a precarious present. Among his many novels are Laugh-

ter in the Dark (self-translated in 1938), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962),

and Ada (1969). His collected poems and chess problems were published in

1971; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov was published in 1995.

Signs and Symbols

I

or the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem

of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in

his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil,

vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross com-

forts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating

a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the

gadget line for instance was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent

trifle: a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

At the time of his birth they had been married already for a long time; a

score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair

Signs and Symbols 1109

was done anyhow. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she pre- sented a naked white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful business- man, was now wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years standing. They seldom saw him and had nicknamed him “the Prince.” That Friday everything went wrong. The underground train lost its life

current between two stations, and for a quarter of an hour one could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of one’s heart and the rustling of news- papers. The bus they had to take next kept them waiting for ages; and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. It was rain- ing hard as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again; and instead of their boy shuffling into the room as he usu- ally did (his poor face blotched with acne, ill-shaven, sullen, and confused), a nurse they knew, and did not care for, appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came. She waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm.

He kept clearing his throat in a special resonant way he had when he was upset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle. During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not

exchange a word; and every time she glanced at his old hands (swollen veins, brown-spotted skin), clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked around trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of com- passion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers, a girl with dark hair

and grubby red toenails, was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna, whose

daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk,’ years ago. The last time he had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s

words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded, had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly—and stopped him. What

he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape. The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a

scientific monthly, but long before that she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. “Referential mania,” Herman Brink had called it. In these

very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is

a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people

from the conspiracy—because he considers himself to be so much more intel- ligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs,

1. A city in western Russia.

1110 VLADIMIR NABOKOV

incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are dis- cussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet,2 by darkly gesticulating trees. Peb- bles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass sur- faces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysteri- cal to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings—but alas it is not! With distance the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhou- ettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs the ultimate truth of his being.

II

When they emerged from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the day were mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper, so she handed him the basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home. He walked up to the third landing and then remembered he had given her his keys earlier in the day.

In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when some ten min- utes later she came, heavily trudging upstairs, wanly smiling, shaking her head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room flat and he at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his mouth apart by means of his thumbs, with a horrible masklike grimace, he removed his new hope- lessly uncomfortable dental plate and severed the long tusks of saliva con- necting him to it. He read his Russian-language newspaper while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale victuals that needed no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent. When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of

soiled cards and her old albums. Across the narrow yard where the rain tin- kled in the dark against some battered ash cans, windows were blandly alight and in one of them a black-trousered man with his bare elbows raised could be seen lying supine on an untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and exam- ined the photographs. As a baby he looked more surprised than most babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig,3 Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house front badly out of focus. Four years old, in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. Aunt Rose, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the

2. Sign language used by the deaf. 3. Leipzig is a city in Germany. The Revolution is the Russian Revolution of 1917-20.

Sips: and Symbols ins

people she had worried about. Age six—that was when he drew wonderfulbirds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player. He again, aged about eight,already difficult to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraidof a certain picture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscape withrocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leaf-less tree. Aged ten: the year they left Europe. The shame, the pity, the humili-ating difficulties, the ugly, vicious, backward children he was with in that special school. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long conva- lescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened as it were into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, mak- ing him totally inaccessible to normal minds. This, and much more, she accepted—for after all living did mean accepting

the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case—mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some rea- son or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurt- ing her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children hum- ming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

III

It was past midnight when from the living room she heard her husband moan; and presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with astrakhan4 collar which he much preferred to the nice blue bathrobe he had. “I can’t sleep,” he cried. “Why,” she asked, “why can’t you sleep? You were so tired.” “I can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said and lay down on the couch. “Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?” “No doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors! We must

get him out of there quick. Otherwise we’ll be responsible. Responsible!” he repeated and hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist. “All right,” she said quietly, “we shall bring him home tomorrow morning.” “I would like some tea,” said her husband and retired to the bathroom. Bending with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph

or two that had slipped from the couch to the floor: knave of hearts, nine of spades, ace of spades, Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in high spirits, saying in a loud voice: “I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each of us will spend

part of the night near him and the other part on this couch. By turns. We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It does not matter what the Prince says. He won’t have to say much anyway because it will come out cheaper.”

4. Lustrous, tight-curled wool (from Astrakhan, a city in southeast Russia).

1112 VLADIMIR NABO KOV

The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for their telephone to ring. His

left slipper had come off and he g roped for it with his heel and toe as he stood

in the middle of the room, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Hav-

ing more English than he did, it was she who attended to calls.

“Can I speak to Charlie,” said a girl’s dull little voice.

“What number you want? No. That is not the right number.”

The receiver was gently cradled. Her hand went to her old tired heart.

“It frightened me,” she said.

He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue.

They would fetch him as soon as it was day. Knives would have to be kept in a

locked drawer. Even at his worst he presente d no danger to other people.

The telephone rang a second time. The same toneless anxious young voice

asked for Charlie.

“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are

turning the letter 0 instead of zero.”

They sat down to their unexpected fest ive midnight tea. The birthday pres-

ent stood on the table. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and

then he imparted a circular motion to his raised glass so as to make the sugar

dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head where there

was a large birthmark stood out conspi cuously and, although he had shaved

that morning, a silvery bristle showed on h is chin. While she poured him

another glass of tea, he put on his spec tacles and re-examined with pleasure

the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled out

their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab

apple, when the telephone rang again. 1958

P.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

b. 1938

Oates grew up in the country near Lockport, New York. She received degrees from Syracuse Uni- versity and the University of Wisconsin before launching one of the more spectacularly prolific— and honored—careers among contemporary writ- ers. Poet and critic as well as fiction writer, she continues to astonish readers with the ingenuity of her formal innovations as with the sheer vol- ume of her production. Violence, madness, and social disorder are frequently her subject matter. The mysteries of psychological and sociological motivation fascinate her; she constructs inge- nious theories to explain them and to focus their moral significance. Her more than forty novels

include them (1969), Bellefleur (1980), You Must Remember This (1987), We Were

the Mulvaneys (1996), The Falls (2004), Little Bird of Heaven (2009), and The

Accursed (2013). Her short stories number more than 700; her many collec-

tions include Marriages and Infidelities (1972), Where Are You Going, Where Have

You Been? (1993), I Am No One You Know (2004), and Evil Eye (2013). She has

published thrillers under pseudonyms as well as a memoir, A Widow’s Story

(2011).

Convalescing

5., I

a he was a fair young woman in blue, her arms and legs tanned, lean, ready

for grappling with the enormous problems of life he had gone blind to, her

voice attractively raspy and yet professional, her blond hair pulled back like

his wife’s, though not so nice as his wife’s—she eyed him with a small univer-

sal smile and said, “Do you prefer toothpaste or tooth powder?” He thought

this over, giving it more thought than he should have. The two of them—the

girl, a stranger to him, and the man, a kindly and amused stranger to himself—

were standing in his side yard, a handsome green yard well-kept and unthreat-

ening, on a Saturday afternoon when everyone else was out. He wanted to

congratulate her on her pretty smile!—did she- prefer toothpaste herself?

What was her secret? But her smile was not very pretty, only coaxing, and he

had a vision of his wife’s quick .excited smile, superimposed upon hers; the

girl seemed suddenly uninteresting. “Toothpaste,” he said. He did not know if this were true, but it. was not

quite a lie.