I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending library spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed the brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors were vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in a magic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompanied the animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists Shipogradov and Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire Geroy nashey ery («Hero of Our Era») and two young poets, Lazarev (collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). Some of the heads turned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to his feet, grinning—but my host said they were having a business meeting and should be left alone.
«You have glimpsed,» he added, «the parturition of a new literary review, Prime Numbers; at least they think they are parturiating: actually, they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something.»
He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight on the gaps in my shelf of books.
«Look,» he cried, «how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary is out, I mean Mary—damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara, not Lermontov’s or Rubinstein’s. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so many damned masterpieces.»
I said I was not feeling well and would like to go home. He offered to accompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directing at me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I was not about to faint. With soothing sounds he led me down a side staircase. The spring night, at least, felt real.
After a moment of rumination and an upward glance at the lighted windows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking the sad little dog of a dog-walking neighbor. I saw my thoughtful companion shake hands with the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to the light of the revelers, then look at his watch, then tip the man, and shake hands with him in parting, as if the ten-minute walk to my lodgings were a perilous pilgrimage.
«Bon,» he said upon rejoining me. «If you don’t want a taxi, let us set out on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps of things I want you to tell me about your work and your life. Your confrхres say you are `arrogant and unsocial’ as Onegin describes himself to Tatiana but we can’t all be Lenskis, can we? Let me take advantage of this pleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. The first was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, the portraits of its most prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poor student, saw him appear in a rosy loge with his wife and two little boys, one of which must have been you. The other time was at a public discussion of current politics in the auroral period of the Revolution; he spoke immediately after Kerenski, and the contrast between our fiery friend and your father, with his English sangfroid and absence of gesticulation—«
«My father,» I said, «died six months before I was born.»
«Well, I seem to have goofed again (opyat’ oskandalisya),» observed Oks, after taking quite a minute to find his handkerchief, blow his nose with the grandiose deliberation of Varlamov in the role of Gogol’s Town Mayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. «Yes, I’m not lucky with you. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable.»
I was to run into Oks again, three or four times at least, in the course of the dwindling years before World War Two. He used to welcome me with a knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughty secret. His superb library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who then lost it to the Russians, even better grabbers in that time-honored game. Osip Lvovich himself was to die when attempting an intrepid escape—when almost having escaped—barefoot, in bloodstained underwear, from the «experimental hospital» of a Nazi concentration camp.
5
My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).
The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865, married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October 22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy.
There might be nothing particularly upsetting about a well-meaning, essentially absurd and muddled old duffer mistaking me for some other writer. I myself have been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when I meant Schiller. But that a fool’s slip of the tongue or error of memory should establish a sudden connection with another world, so soon after my imagining with especial dread that I might be permanently impersonating somebody living as a real being beyond the constellation of my tears and asterisks—that was unendurable, that dared not happen!
As soon as the last sound of poor Oksman’s farewells and excuses had subsided, I tore off the striped woollen snake strangling me and wrote down in cipher every detail of my meeting with him. Then I drew a thick line underneath and a caravan of question marks.
Should I ignore the coincidence and its implications? Should I, on the contrary, repattern my entire life? Should I abandon my art, choose another line of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, a lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian translation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses to kick? But only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid self could keep me more or less sane. All I did finally was drop my pen name, the rather cloying and somehow misleading «V. Irisin» (of which my Iris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were a villa), and revert to my own family name.
It was with this name that I decided to sign the first installment of my new novel The Dare for which the émigré magazine Patria was waiting. I had finished rewriting in reptile-green ink (a placebo to enliven my task) a second or third fair copy of the opening chapter, when Annette Blagovo came to discuss hours and terms.
She came on May 2, 1934, half-an-hour late, and as persons do who have no sense of duration, laid the blame for her lateness on her innocent watch, an object for measuring motion, not time. She was a graceful blonde of twenty-six years or so, with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty features. She wore a gray tailor-made jacket over a white silk blouse that looked frilly and festive because of a kind of bow between the lapels, to one of which was pinned a bunchlet of violets. Her short smartly cut gray skirt had a nice dash about it, and all in all she was far more chic and soignиe than an average Russian young lady.
I explained to her (in what struck her—so she told me much later—as the unpleasantly bantering tone of a cynic sizing up a possible conquest) that I proposed to dictate to her every afternoon «right into the typewriter» (pryamo v mashinku) heavily corrected drafts or else chunks and sausages of fair copy that I would probably revise «in the lonely hours of night,» to quote A. K. Tolstoy, and have her retype next day. She did not remove her close-fitting hat, but peeled off her gloves and, pursing her bright pink freshly painted mouth, put on large tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and the effect somehow enhanced her looks: she desired to see my machine (her icy demureness would have turned a saint into a salacious jester), had to hurry to another appointment but just wanted to check if she could use it. She took off her green cabochon ring (which I was to find after her departure) and seemed about to tap out a quick sample but a second glance satisfied her that my typewriter was of the same make as her own.
Our first session proved pretty awful. I had learned my part with the care of a nervous actor, but did not reckon with the kind of fellow performer who misses or fluffs every other cue. She asked me not to go so fast. She put me off by fatuous remarks: «There is no such expression in Russian,» or
